Unit 3: European alternatives for SMEs
Europe has excellent cloud providers, far cheaper than the American giants and perfectly suited to an SME. Let us look at them with a practical comparison.
The reference point is a typical server for Odoo with 10-20 users: 4 vCPU, 16 GB of RAM and 200 GB SSD.
Comparison table (prices verified 2025-2026, VAT not included)
| Provider | Country | Price/month | For | Against |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS (EC2 t3.xlarge) | USA | 120-150 EUR | World leader, endless services | Complex, expensive, data outside the EU by default |
| Azure | USA | 100-140 EUR | Integration with Microsoft 365 | Complex, tied to the Microsoft ecosystem |
| Google Cloud | USA | 90-130 EUR | Powerful in AI and data | Total overkill for an SME |
| DigitalOcean | USA | 50-85 EUR | Simple interface, good documentation | Fewer services, data in the USA |
| OVH | France | 20-45 EUR | European, GDPR native, data centres in France | Slow support, Strasbourg incident 2021 |
| Hetzner | Germany | 15-30 EUR | Best price/performance ratio in Europe | No managed support, basic interface |
| Contabo | Germany | 8-15 EUR | Ultra cheap, lots of RAM for little money | Limited support, previous-generation hardware |
| Scaleway | France | 15-35 EUR | European, modern, good API | Less mature and smaller community than OVH |
| On-premise | Your office | Hardware cost + electricity | Full control, no monthly fee, low latency | You are responsible for everything |
Look at the difference in prices. An equivalent server costs between 120 and 150 euros a month on AWS, and between 15 and 30 euros a month on Hetzner. We are talking about 5 to 10 times less. And the quality of service for what an SME needs is exactly the same.
And what about Odoo SaaS?
Odoo offers its own SaaS service directly at odoo.com. The price in 2025 is roughly 24.90 EUR per user per month on the Standard (Enterprise) plan, or 37.40 EUR on the Custom plan. For a company of 10 users, that comes to between 250 and 374 euros a month, in licences alone. And remember: you are in the "furnished flat" model - you cannot install community OCA modules, you cannot customise freely, and the portability of your data is limited.
With Odoo Community Edition (free software) on a Hetzner server, those same 10 users cost you 15-30 euros a month in hosting. The difference is enormous.
Our clear recommendation
For a Spanish SME: OVH or Hetzner for cloud production. OVH if you value having a French provider with data centres in Europe and support (albeit slow) in Spanish. Hetzner if you prioritise the best possible price with excellent hardware. Both are European, comply with the GDPR natively and have data centres in the European Union.
An important lesson: the OVH fire in Strasbourg
On 10 March 2021, at 00:47 in the early hours of the morning, a fire broke out in OVH's SBG2 data centre in Strasbourg (France). A hundred firefighters with 44 trucks took six hours to bring it under control. The result: the SBG2 building was completely destroyed and four rooms in the neighbouring SBG1 building suffered serious damage.
The impact was enormous: 3.6 million websites across 464,000 domains went offline, from small websites to government portals in Poland, France and the United Kingdom. Many companies lost their data irrecoverably.
The worst part: some companies were paying OVH for an extra backup service, but those backups were in the same data centre as the main servers. When the building burned, data and backups were lost at the same time. OVH was ordered to pay 250,000 euros to two of those companies.
The lesson is not "do not use OVH" (in fact, we use it). The lesson is: backups must be in a physically different location from the original data. Always. If your provider says they make backups, ask them where they keep them. If they are in the same building, they are not real backups.
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