Not really a joke at all, the point is to find a cloud provider that can place resources in a guaranteed location that stays within the legal boundaries of a country.

This is for when you need to guarantee that your services cannot possibly escape boundaries of a specific country.

A VPS is still "cloud" though, isn't it?

They are on the way, they introduced s3, and now better dns Management

There is still a lot missing, and tbh the s3 did not work great when I tested it.

Cloud services like AWS offer VPSes (Lightsail) so the boundary is very blurry. In any case Hertzner offers load balances, firewalls, private networks, which is fairly cloudy stuff.

Since "cloud" just means someone else's computer, I don't see how it doesn't qualify.

They have a cloud offering. Hourly billing instances with basic management features. They also have an S3 compatible storage service as part of it and a load balancer.

I mean it is not really "cloud" compared to larger ones, just a toy but they are building things now.

Hetzner is of the opinion that they have a cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Whether it has enough features to satisfy your needs is another question, but it is more than just bare metal or vps

Hetzner has VPS servers. Has a web-based admin dashboard. Its API can create and teardown servers, virtual networks, block stores, load balancers, firewalls, DNS zones. It's similar to OVHCloud and Linode in my experience. If all these features are not sufficiently characteristic of clouds and abstractions, then I probably don't understand those two terms themselves.

How would you classify VPS and dedicated servers though? Aren't those considered infra?

On which infrastructure does Nodion run? You have and manage your own racks?

Thanks for asking! The infrastructure is actually the less interesting part for us, since our platform is written to be completely portable. The USP is the platform itself, that means the managed aspect. You can run your workload on our platform without having to worry too much about servers or infrastructure. Deployment can be done either through Git Integrations or our 1 click deployment option for popular open source services. You can scale your application up and down in seconds and additionally we try to offer every important component as an all in one solution inhouse. Think managed dbs, transactional emails, etc., those are all products we offer today.

We actually started out in 2019 by colocating our own network/server equipment in a colo facility in Frankfurt (InterXion). We are bootstrapped and since our USP is the software, not the infrastructure, we decided to partner with a reliable infrastructure company that is available globally, flexible enough and for data privacy reasons is an EU based company (there are not many!) so we could roll out our platform faster. Since we still own our own IP space and are a RIPE member, we can migrate to our own infrastructure down the road.

In this business the focus shouldn't be to own the whole "supply chain", but to deliver a reliable solution to customers. Everyone is a reseller of someone.

Nodion -> Leaseweb. Leaseweb -> Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain -> electricity companies, dark fiber, etc.

Heroku/Vercel -> AWS. AWS also uses colo facilities like Equinix, InterXion, NTT or e-shelter in Frankfurt.

Hmm, possibly in the enterprise sector, I think Hetzner has more clients, but OVH has the bigger clients.

They have launched. But their firts data center will not be built until next year. They are running on CoLos currently.

Basically everyone with even a CDN endpoint on the US is under Cloud Act. Hetzner, OVH, etc. Maybe only Scaleway that I couldn’t find any mentions of an US PoP.

I'm aware. I think the EU have being trying to co-opt the word european which is absolutely insane. You will see it frequently from EU politicians "Europe will back ukraine with X". Putin and erm I imagine 3/4s of Russias population lives in Europe.

"The UK doesn't even allow end-to-end encryption" thats 100% not true, just completely false.

"has some Draconian surveillance laws", sure and what EU countries don't - you must be joking?

"I very much doubt it can be GDPR compliant" The GDPR is retained in domestic law, it's literally the exact same situation as before brexit.