As 2025 came to a close we thought we’d take stock of all the hosting providers we use. As we’ve had to host stuff of all shapes and sizes for over 15 years, we have data all over the shop.
Also, since the current regime over in the united states is treating the EU like a toilet with some hostility, it behooves us to rely on and support European companies wherever possible.
While we are unlikely to find providers who don’t rely on some US hyperscaler or other to run functions or store data under the covers, we will continue to keep an eye on european-alternatives.eu.
Anyway, depressing geopolitics aside, here’s where we keep our bits and bytes:
Web App hosting
Netlify
Our go-to host for most projects, client and side. 126 projects up there, mostly Astro, Nuxt and Vue web apps. 40 on custom domains.
Netlify Pro is a very reasonable $19/mo for the lot.
Pros
Cons
Cloudflare
We have a few clients who have existing Cloudflare accounts and prefer to host their web apps there.
We also use cloudflare to serve images for a newsletter project which costs around £100/pa to ship ~20 million images
Pros
Cons
Pikapods
An exciting new discovery for 2025! Open source web app hosting.
We have settled on using the excellent Directus for our non-WordPress CMS systems, and Pikapods is turning out to be the perfect host.
One pod per client cms, which is costing us around $4/mo per pod.
We are evaluating a PocketBase pod to replace supabase/appwrite/firebase, which costs even less (around $2/mo per pod).
Pros
Cons
WordPress
Spaceship
We evaluated spaceship for hosting a couple of WordPress sites last year after being let down by Gandi (see 2026 losers below).
We have now moved all (20+) our low-traffic WordPress sites and a couple of PHP projects to Spaceship’s Web Hosting Supreme package for around £100/pa.
Pros
Cons
WP Engine
For our more popular, high-traffic WordPress sites, and when our client prefers to own the hosting, we have been recommending WP Engine.
They’ve proved rock-solid and have great features (rollback backups, staging/prod tools, local dev platform, migration plugins).
Pros
Cons
Database hosting
Supabase & AppWrite
We previously used google’s Firebase for data hosting, but moved our data for brighton.dog and spike.news to the Supabase free tier and the data for grater.app and some other side projects to AppWrite’s free tier.
Not sure we’ve even touched either in a year. They are very similar services. We will probably use the open source PocketBase for similar projects going forward.
Pros
Cons
Misc
AWS
We use iDrive and AWS glacier for offsite backups, and iDrive e2 and AWS S3 for daily backups for our websites.
Workhorses both, boring, inexpensive and stable, but US based – we will look into bunny.net or similar in 2026.
Proton
We migrated from google docs/workspace to Proton this year which has been a resounding success, and as they offer drive, vpn, docs, sheets (new!) and soon, video conferencing.
We were able to consolidate and ditch Workspace, Dropbox and NordVPN, reducing cost and suppliers – not to mention the huge privacy/EU wins. Recommended.
Porkbun
We have gradually moved all our own – and our client’s – domains to Porkbun as each one comes up for renewal elsewhere. Robust, cheap, and with lovably crappy microcopy and UI.
Unfortunately US based so we may re-evaluate this.
GitHub
We keep our code in GitHub for reasons of inertia. We should move to gitlab or similar but the thought of moving 200-odd repos is daunting.
Our only Microsoft service and so like the Hague and Airbus, we will look into leaving in 2026.
Losers
We dropped a few providers this year – some we have loved for years, others more of a riddance.
Digital Ocean
No hate for Digital Ocean, just expensive and it’s been a pain to host WordPress on their droplets. Moved the sites to wp-engine.
Google Workspace
Moved from an advertising company to proton. We miss gmail’s excellent email search but that is literally it, no other regrets.
We even tracked down and killed a recurring 19p/mo google cloud storage bucket that we’d been ignoring for years.
Firebase
Not a bad product at all – although their pricing and rules are a little opaque. Mostly just pleased to move away from google.
Gandi
The biggest disappointment, we were loyal customers for a decade+. France-based, we hosted all our domains and WordPress sites there, but they got acquired and jacked all the prices up enormously.
The final straw was a £40 one-year renewal fee for a .com (!!!). We moved that to porkbun which cost £60 for eight years.
Their slogan was No Bullshit, unfortunately now, All Bullshit. A tragedy.
2026 Goals
Writing all this out has been edifying for us. Hosting is cheap. We have a long way to go to de-USify. It would be nice to consolidate further.
Our biggest and easiest win was moving away from google. Getting our code away from microsoft’s github and our storage out of amazon should be next on our to-do list.
We haven’t found a good EU alternative to Netlify. A Spaceship alternative is probably easier, we could move to Hetzner, Vultr, OVH, and Hostinger Pro looks good, but we don’t feel too bad about relying on these non-giant services – for now.
To end on a positive note, Pikapods has been a wonderful discovery and wins our provider of the year – we will for sure spin up a few more pods in 2026!