Hey all, I hope I’m on topic, I host a bunch of self hosted services at home, however with the way things are going in the UK I’m looking to get a VPS set up, initially to use as a proxy and wireguard pop, probably move more stuff to avoid censorship later on (use case is a little fuzzy just yet).
So, primary question is - any suggestions for good VPS providers that aren’t the big 3 tech bros, in Western Europe, preferably France, Netherlands Belgium or Spain ?
Secondary question, my ISP throttled all VPN traffic the other week, we have 3 different VPN providers (2 mainstream 1 small player) across about a dozen devices they were all throttled to 250K. If you turned VPN off or split tunneled it went back to 100mb plus (I have a 1Gb connection).
When I asked on reddit for advice the reddit bots immediately jumped in with “oh it’s just your VPN provider” however if I dropped phones off the wifi and connected to mobile telephony the VPN’d connections were fine - similar speed to split tunnel less some overhead. Lasted for 12 hours and then went back to normal. I assume I was being sin-binned for too much sailing of the seven seas.
Any idea what settings I can tweak to make it harder for them to throttle me ? I tried changing the Mullvad one to use port 443 but it didn’t affect the throttling - maybe they’d already put the throttle on for anything encrypted by that point ?
Edit to fix poor grammar
Edit 2 - thank you all so much for the rapid replies, I’m going with OVHCloud as the cheapest option at my desired spec, with Ionos as the fallback if I have any issues with it.
The list you guys gave was brilliant though, so many options. Really appreciated
You must log in or # to comment.
You gotta take a look at datalix.eu, they are actually the backend for a lot of small resellers and they got good hardware for the money.
They always have a “sale” going on but they sometimes chance the hardware, i recommend waiting for the one with ddr4 ram it costs the same, also the “sale” VPS renews at sale price too also when the hardware on “sale” changes
This is late but I switched to Hetzner and Domeneshop from AWS for VPS hosting and DNS and I’ve been quiet happy. I have a dedicated VPS with far more power for far less than I paid through AWS.
Also using Hetzner’s storagebox as a Google Drive replacement.
For European VPS providers:
- Dutch: tilaa.com
- French: ovhcloud.com
- German: hetzner.com
- Swiss: exoscale.com
German: netcup.eu
Lithuania/France/Germany: hostinger
Hostinger were very dear (double) compared to most of the other options at the lower/middle end (2cpu/4gb-ram/50+gb), but thanks very much for the suggestion, appreciated.
Thanks very much, I’m going with OVH and really appreciate so many options.
I use OVH, have done for a long time. Have a dedicated host with them and my DNS, DNS also has an API to allow getting wild card certificates
online.net, French dedi provided that rolled their own cloud stack in the last decade
My OVH experience was fucking awful, I wouldnt go anywhere near them. Big data collection scheme. Even the big 3 want less from you to spin up a machine or delete an account.
Ahh. That’s bad. What exactly did they do that made it feel like a data collection scheme ?
Asking for loads of personal information on sign up and then when I requested deletion, they requested even more. This was like 7 years ago, maybe they changed or got called out. Either way, I’ll never use them again.
Regarding VPN being slow, two possibilities here:
- They analyze internet packets, detect VPN connections and deliberately throttle them.
- They just slow down anything that is not a common protocol (not http, https, ftp, …) that would make other things like torrent or even ssh session to be also equally slow.
If it is the first possibility, I know that OpenVPN with static key tend to be very difficult to detect if not impossible. Its also a bit faster but it has its cons that I encourage you to read about.
If it is the second possibility then you need to disguise your VPN traffic as https. I know its doable but I am fuzzy on the details.
ShadowSocks might be what you’re referring to. https://shadowsocks.org/
I haven’t investigated it much but AdGuard’s VPN masquerades as https traffic and might work for you. They recently open sourced it too:
Yeah, I hope it’s not deep packet inspection, Mullvad has dropped support for OpenVPN (wireguard only), the other two still support it, I’ll have a bit more of a dig, my network skills beyond the basics are getting rusty. Disguising it as https should just be putting it on port 443 and making sure it’s TCP only I would have thought ?
Go to https://lowendbox.com/ and click “shop now” under “explore cheap hosting deals” to filter by country. I have Racknerd and Hosthatch (in SE/NL), both of which have been fine for my extremely limited needs.
Thank you
VPN throttling: are you sure your DNS traffic’s going through the VPN tunnel and going to an external server, not your ISP’s?
If they can see where you’re browsing, maybe that’s triggered something.
If it was only for a few hours though, maybe they just had an internal problem?
Give them a call and ask them. And if they’re doing something weird (throttling traffic), they should be able to tell you why… and consider leaving them if they’re not providing the service you need.
Great questions.
I’m reasonably confident the DNS requests are not going to the ISP but I wouldn’t bet parts of my anatomy on it. The router is set to call Mullvad’s DNS with quad 9 as the fallback (which is obv for unencrypted traffic and the initial call to start a VPN session), the Mullvad client definitely calls to their dns and they have tests on their website for dns and rtc leaks which they pass.
The other two have similar setups, although the minor one I might just carefully check.
There is unfortunately only 1 ISP in my area (Virgin), and I would really love to not be using them - they have an awful reputation for a very good reason. Their support team is truly atrocious, and from previous experience I’ll get an answer like
“I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?” “Yes I appreciate that, but are you throttling my VPN ?” “I’m sorry, we don’t support VPNs, is there anything else we can help you with ?”
Continue loop until you hang up.
For your first question: Here in Germany we have Ionos and Strato which offer VPS for relatively low prices. A friend of mine uses Ionos VPS and from what I experienced during study projects, it works well. Your second question could maybe be answered by someone with more experience in that area :)
Thanks very much
I’ve been very happy with Netcup too as a European VPS provider. They have a coupon until the 17th if you decide to go with them, I think it applies 7EUR off of a purchase above 7EUR: netcupSpring26
As for throttling of the VPN traffic from the ISP side, that’s hard to say. Theoretically it’s possible they are doing deep packet inspection to specifically target VPN traffic, which would work through different ports, but I’d think that’s overkill. Maybe they’re doing it by protocol and just throttling UDP traffic, which would be easier, but I don’t know how to confirm that with mullvad.
Thank you
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IP Internet Protocol TCP Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #231 for this comm, first seen 11th Apr 2026, 11:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
deleted by creator
