I've always looked for a EU based alternative to Cloudflare; not because I didn't like them, I still support Cloudflare and they're a great company, but pushing for and testing EU services is important particularly in the light of recent developments in EU-US geopolitics.
The problem is that many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart. Consider Hetzner as an example: how can you imagine being competitive with US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) by raising the prices so much, in such a short time, with so little previous communication to your customers?
BunnyNet on the other hand is being competitive and this move is in the right direction. Of course their free tier is not comparable to Cloudflare (they are two different companies, with different profiles in terms of debt, cash in hand and so on), but it doesn't need to be for small projects.
I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
edit:
Actually I had completely missed the most recent price update. I made this comment referring to April 1st pricing.
I did not receive a communication about the June 15th update, because it did not apply to existing resources.
This gives the breakdown:
https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
There is also large premium for hosting in Ashburn compared to Europe for the CPX line, which are the shared/subscribed tier. The SKUs are different so its not directly comparable but for example CPX32 (4vCPU/8GB) is 35.49 EUR in Falkenstein but a CPX31 (4vCPU/8GB) is 62.49 EUR in Ashburn and has far less bandwidth.
Its just simply unsustainable and burns a lot of trust/good will if you increase your prices 3x in such a short period of time
Trust me when I say this but Hetzner really belonged in its category previously. I had scoured almost everything and nothing could provide the scale at price Hetzner did back then but now I would say that its simply not true anymore and that there might be better options out there for what its worth.
I am really sad for Hetzner as I really enjoyed them and always wanted to build on top of them but looks like all good things come to an end :-(
Hetzner's latest price increase doubled-to-tripled the costs of any new resources I would deploy there. I've now halted the migration and I am seriously considering going all the way back to colo.
This most recent price increase was not communicated months in advance. I'm kind of wondering if you're thinking of the other price increase that happened this year, and not the most recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540844
I have two CCX13, which were small (2CPU, 8GB RAM) dedicated compute VMs in Ashburn. Those are 16.99 EUR / month on my account, but for me to add another would now cost 43.99 EUR.
But, hetzner was a really solid deal especially for larger specs, literally nothing could compete with it as I used to make literal lists of providers in my head that can compete against Hetzner/ovhcloud and there were none. They were so good, too good in fact and I had actually felt like they were so giant that they would be able to survive the ramflation and it would be the small shops who would be hurt the most but turns out that although yes small shops are hurt, even the largest of giants like Hetzner couldn't resist the Ramflation and were (forced?) for price increase whereas incredibly I have found small shops to still somehow be more resistant/competitive than the larger beasts.
Pardon me if I am wrong, which I usually am, but aren't there price differences between pre-existing customers and new customers as well, atleast if I am remembering it correctly.
@AussieWog93's comments also make sense in terms of somethings going up by 3x. There seems to be a general consensus online from my limited understanding that some if not many products have increased their prices quite substantially.
You said you are on older infra? So why did they increase your costs 1.25x?
That old hardware has long depreciated and paid itself back many times over and you run a higher risk of an outage due to components wearing out over time.
You should be asking for a discount!
And burning existing customers costs a lot more than soaking new customers. Churn always costs far more in lost revenue than a slowdown in new customers. Plus, it impacts market image in a deeply negative way.
Overall I am unsure of how much of the thing was under Hetzner's control itself or not in terms of raising the prices given Ramflation but in deep part I am saddened by it rather than angry on the state of how the whole situation turned out to be, and I wish nothing but good for hetzner as they move past this ramflation and hopefully people are able to give a look at some smaller shops as well which are made of mostly lovely people as well.
I hope that more people look at smaller hosting providers in general who were previously unable to compete at the level of hetzner but now are actually able to do so. I recommend trying them out and talking with them and using it for atleast hobby projects and hopefully even serious projects as I know some hosting providers smaller in scale than Hetzner but are something on which I might feel as comfortable as Hetzner on deploying, if not a bit more because sadly for better or for worse Hetzner is quite strict in some aspects.
Not everything is good though and some providers are in fact dead-pooling as well and shutting down or raising prices but not to the degree of 3 times. They don't have the leverage that Hetzner does and people would simply migrate but both Buyvm and netcup are notable examples of price increase at the levels of 18-20% for most usecases which was still comparatively high back when they were done but understandable because of ram crisis, which is why my understanding of hetzner's price increase stops being a little understandable.
Ram prices are already declining from its peak and its around 2028 when its mentioned to have a glut. So as easy as it is for me to say but the crisis is comparatively short and there have been other costs involved for hosting providers which is declining (cost of IPv4 is declining as AWS,Google and other giants have stopped hoarding/buying even more IPv4)
It's a tough space for hosting provider but I hope I have shown the how part of how they manage it, its not as easy as it was during the 2020's but it is managable with some smart price increases and other mechanisms or so I have heard. I have just recently bought a few 7$/yr vps's from such shared providers. They don't earn too much from the 7$/yr vps's as much as they earn from the word of mouth (TNAHosting ftw) and thinking of it as (amortizing?) advertisement costs.
Which is why considering all of this and the fact that I was a very massive Hetzner fan back in the day pre price increase, I have felt like the way Hetzner has done things just doesn't feel very Hetzner-y and that there were better ways to manage it and even if not, then there are better shops out there welcoming you, waiting for you to give them a shot as well. I have written another comment detailing some other MASSIVE list of providers as well if this interests ya.
The thing after Hetzner's price increase is that there isn't one size fits all anymore and I guess it might not impact people like me who knows in my opinion, many providers but in this situation its a net loss for many who might be paying higher prices. So here is my small list:
if you want vps that are behind nat: @backtogeek at (tierhive.net) is your guy. He's on hackernews as well.
If you want a very small vps with high egress: Upcloud is an interesting option as they provide 33TB (100mbps) even on their smallest machines. Ionos is a good option as well.
Dedirock/host-c are good for storage backup. Don't rely on their reliability or bandwidth but rely on having multiple deplyoments on different such servers for good backups.
Main: OVHCloud/Greencloud/onidel/buyvm and to a lesser degree Netcup as well are some good verdicts. I like layer7 and servarica as well and I have personally talked in direct messages to the person behind loclix.io
I personally use TNAHosting/Avahosting 7$/11$ yr servers respectively as I am idling them. You might be amazed by what 7$ servers can achieve as I usually code in golang/rust which work extremely good, I also host my own mail server on Tnahosting as it has port 25 enabled (though I do this just for fun) and in my lifetime, I also had a Netcup vps for 10$ for 3 months which had 8gb ram and 4 cores and 500 gb HDD.
I use cloudflare tunnels in front of my vps to prevent DDOS, not that my website has a lot of traffic anyway and have previously made custom scripts to manage it easier and I sometimes use zed and zed's remote server to connect to my server especially when I was on my netcup server and I also use micro-editor quite frequently on my vps's.
Oh can't forget xhosts.uk if you want UK vps's. I really feel like they are a good host and I have said their story on HN earlier as well but they sadly had some disabilities but instead of taking the disability check, they wanted to earn and make their own way and so have operated a vps servers because they like doing this. I really have a lot of respect for them.
"instead of taking the easy option and claim all kinds of money from the government for my disabilities I work as much as I can and hope I strike it lucky with the right customers one day."
This is a comment that they had written with me in personal discussions.
Ethernet servers is a good provider if you want port 25 access/mail access from what I've heard about them as they don't usually allow it. Skrime.eu can fit in some of my criterias as well. H4F.net(Riyad) is a respected provider as well.
Advinserver is good as well as they provide the stats of all servers so you can find the amount of steal and other factors and I have heard some people say some good things about them.
Hosting is one of the few businesses which is cooperative and competitive between many of these players and especially on the lower side of things run much on goodwill. There are always some cases of complaints but its a comfy space. You can almost find a specific host which can be best for your use case and it can be worth finding them out. I have tried to give the limited knowledge that I have.
but lets face it, what i have written is probably a brain fart and Its mostly information overload and I dont expect people to change their providers with this but my point is to be more aware about the provider space in general and to find the best provider for your own specific use case.
Feel free to e-mail me (mail in profile) if you have any specific use case and if I could help optimize the bill or give a more specific list of providers who can help in your use case. Price itself isn't the only factor as there are of reputation, steal factor, long term sustainability and many others.
I have spent too much time on such forums (to even a detrimental cost indeed) and I just like sharing the few things that I know. Perhaps I can get someone to save some money as some of these providers have affiliate programs and I can then spend that money to buy more french fries :-D
Have a nice day and take care. Domains are much more simplified though than servers and I recommend people to look at https://tld-list.com if they want to find out about domains.
Everyone's prices have gone up and i checked if i could go elsewhere and they are still cheaper for their quality level. Deffo beat Digital Ocean and cloud overlords like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc for my needs.
I am particularly pleased they locked in my old hosting plan prices after the recent increase. Seems fair. New hardware has skyrocketed in cost so I don't see how you can avoid price increases.
Their lack of user care shows when you start talking to support. I've never had this experience with an US company (except the US giants) where support basically gives me an "it is what it is".
The most recent that really put the cherry on top.
I was planning on dropping them when running out of prepaid credits.
ALL SaaS software I've used before that had a top up option would notify me when my credits where about to run out. Bunny doesn't.
What is a point of a credit bar (progress bar) of you can go into negative? I went into negative.
There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Which should remain as credits in your account for future use.
But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
Support: paraphrasing "that sounds right". And I could be quoting them with this for almost all 3 times I've interacted with them.
Yes, I am very much unpleased on customer support experience. But they are not unique and a symptom of multiple EU providers I've switched to in the last 3 years.
What would an american provider have done? Changed their pricing model for you?
At least they can say "we sympathize but it's not a priority" or "it's a medium priority but we don't have a concrete timeline" or at least recommend best practices/workarounds
You can be metered or fixed price. Mixing the two in the most inuintive way possible is a true innovation. /s
Other cloud based provider have the option to pay for your usage to the cent. I guess that innovation didn't reach the EU. /s
Most likely they are unwilling to let customers pay later without any guarantee that they're good faith and solvent. Maybe it is a cultural thing? It's only my personal opinion but it never struck me as unreasonable.
"Our system will automatically send multiple warning emails if your account balance drops beyond a certain point" from https://bunny.net/faq
I don't know what that "certain point" is, though.
> There is no option to pay only what you've used, but the minimum necessary is a 10er.
Yeah, annoying but also understandable because of payment processing fees.
> But then you can't even spin down your usage by dropping everything because merely having the account you pay the monthly subscription of 1+vat.
That's incorrect, if you have zones, then you get billed €1/mo, if you don't have anything, then you aren't billed anything... this is my billing history:
Monthly usage for May, 2026: $1
Monthly usage for February, 2026: $1
Monthly usage for July, 2024: $1
Monthly usage for June, 2024: $1
Monthly usage for July, 2022: $1
You are correct on the billing front. I checked the dashboard and I misremembered the day I switched off my resources. June was a slow moving month and I though it happened last month!
I'll retract my claim in the previous comment if I still can edit.
I don't know, this was not the first time I got surprised by their system.
Before that I preloaded my account for a couple of credits (+vat). Then they switched to monthly invoicing (+vat for my existing credit). Basically I got double VATed (?) for the single initial payment. Paid for 12 months upfront only to have to recharge more quickly. Why should it be my problem that they have problems understanding billing and building billing systems?
In the past when I signed up it was advertised as usage based billing with the fixed monthly fee somewhere in the fine print? But there is also some usage minimum because at some point I started getting credits used. But not in the first few months where my traffic was under some threshold.
It doesn't help that they constantly move things around in their website with no clear thought. Like how I was corrected in another comment thread with information that isn't on the expected pages like pricing or terms of service.
Maybe they just lack understanding of user experience. Or I'm just a dumb user. I accept either theory.
edit: honestly I don't know if I was double VAT situation or just became a non VAT except company, and ain't gonna dig that up, but if it's the later they should have swallowed the cost for existing credit because changing expected outcomes mid way is no bueno.
Similar US vendors = you're lucky to even get someone to talk to or is too far from the chain to actually know so you get a "generic" answer.
At the time I was paying $12/month IIRC.
That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.
Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!
Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.
I'm really sorry if it sounded like a GPT trope, but that came 100% from me.
Not that this is a guarantee of quality (actually it's not), but certainly
authenticity. Probably I'm using so many agents lately that I'm starting
speaking like them lol
It sounds natural to me. Remember that most people here are non-native speakers, including OP.
I guess what this reveals is that they were operating on really tight margins.
Bunny CDN of course runs on RAM/SSD but their costs are also developing and operating services on top. Their costs are comparatively less impacted by the RAM/SSD issue.
Hetzner might not have raised prices so suddenly if they had similar services.
Indeed, Hetzner DNS has been free for a long time.
>many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart.
I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterprise accounts, they want mature, manage services.
The few EU clouds that do have a comparable range of managed services also have AWS-like pricing: https://eualternative.eu/eu-cloud-comparison/
Great for what? Centralizing the internet? making it impossible to exercise your rights to delete your account? Not making alternative plans when one line of change breaks many services?
But they are a private company with only one small $6m funding round back in 2022, so I think they are more focused on building organically and not chasing investor funded growth.
Good luck to Bunny!
> EU based alternative to Cloudflare
>So, we’ve eliminated DNS query fees entirely.
> Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries and includes free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains per account. There are no query limits, no per-request billing, and no critical features hidden behind enterprise plans. (Yes, that includes smart records and health monitoring too.)
>As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.
Oh..kayy.
The fact is we're here because they posted a blog talking about how great they are making DNS free "because a faster internet won’t build itself".
But now I've just learnt from comments on HN that Bunny DNS isn't free.
They've lost my trust before they even had it.
I'll also say that I've used around 140 gigs of bandwidth the last two months and my costs has only been <$2. Worth it to me, and doubly worth it to avoid the tyranny of big tech (which includes cloudflare).
It literally explains this in the blog post
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.
Sure seems like you’re trying very hard to find a problem here.
If you’re not down with their prepaid/$1 model there is always CF.
AWS can make data export free, and no-one's going to shout at them that it's not free because it cost money to store the data there in the first place.
Bunny offers a number of services to paying customers. One of the services, that would previously have incurred a cost, now does not. It is free.
I've read reports of companies on the business plan being strong armed into signing Enterprise plans with 1 year upfront.
It's a listed company with revenue expectations, and VERY good at marketing itself, but it's free tier of CDN/DDOS to start off with is a good deal.
Krebs wrote some rather scathing posts about them when they were starting up.
As far as I know, Bunny products are their own business units with their own goals and feature requests (Bunny Stream, in particular, lacks a lot of features) and the “block all requests after the bill becomes 50 EUR” ONLY exists for Bunny CDN, not for their other products.
The day Bunny starts treating all their products evenly (and listen to requests asking to implement basic features) will be the day I will switch all my nonprofit communities to their services.
AFAIK is the only provider in which you can have functional billing limits and not just alerts that still depend on you reacting on them in time.
That's one thing. The second thing, I'm happy for you that you have more information about their pricing system than their pricing page and terms of service page state.
Also: https://support.bunny.net/hc/en-us/articles/360000235911-How...
But yes, other services will run until your account is dry, then it gets suspended. You can't set a spend limit on your scripts without it taking down the whole account. You can't do cost optimization, but at least you are protected from going bankrupt.
I once had some pretty serious DoS attack, but fortunately, I didn't had to pay more than what was pre-paid.
If it's just some simple website, then LLM/crawlers probably won't get you anywhere near thousands of euros. The CDN costs $0.01 - $0.06 per GB
...
You can limit some of their services, like the CDN (which is the most important one in my opinion):
- Download speed limit
- Requests per IP
- Data transfer per IP
- Max connections per IP
And monthly bandwidth limit, which disables the zone if you reach x GB.
I'm really waiting for a streamlined static website hosting experience to move everything to Bunny. At the moment, Cloudflare Pages is still much more straightforward with one CLI command to deploy a website.
Also, we are using Bunny containers with our global API gateway with 16 worldwide locations and it is really crazy - the cost is $3.60/mo (Go backend + Bunny billing based on resource utilization, not provisioning). With a relatively small usage of 20k API requests/mo, it's still stupidly cheap.
https://github.com/cloudflare/pp-browser-extension seems kind of dead (a dependabot zombie).
eta: I completely missed this two days ago: https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudfl...
So it's content DNS service; with server-side resource record shuffling; and with JavaScript, and badly written examples that don't check the question type, just to make it weird.
We're doing discovery on API key scopes at the moment, we don't yet have a public ETA for this but rest assured it's being worked on!
Regarding IPv6-only origin support, We brought this in just last week! We now support IPv6-only addresses direct as an origin, as a hostname, as well as dual stack hostname resolution.
Best, Joe
It would be awesome if the API would get more robust and documented in general -- right now it seems some params seem to not really work (ex storage zone search), and other endpoints take so many without much clarity over what will be set as the default and what's required. I found that for most calls I needed to check the network requests from the dashboard to see how to use them, would be awesome to have more documentation and examples here showing common flows.
If you had have supported API key scoping then I'd have a ton of businesses/startups running on you. As it stands currently it's difficult for me to recommend you to orgs that are scaling up. Compliance in particular was the biggest issue. For one-man shops it's a no-brainer.
In your defense, Cloudflare has historically also sucked in this area.
Anyways, I'm looking forward to this feature!
How does the USD1 minimum works? Say I have setup a pull zone and i don't use it for over a month, I get charged anyway?
Thanks.
So, my scripts on my servers dont have the bunny api key. Its only saved within those edge functions and I authenticate against the edge functions.
A little bit more effort than scoped keys but it works
I deploy my website using their API. So on every push, GitHub Actions builds it and copies the dist/ to Bunny and purges the cache afterwards. Everything has been working perfectly. I can only recommend. It's also quite easy if you don't know about the modern way of doing things and just want to use an FTP to put your website online. Especially attractive for IndieWeb folks.
I've owned domains for ~20 years... I'm okay for paying for the domain, I'm okay with some of that money being used to maintain the DNS servers... I've never had a company charge for queries. Why would they do that?
Dynamic, geo routed, load balanced low TTL queries tend to have a fee.
The only annoyance is that their domain import auto-detects existing records, but it seems to miss a lot of them so you end up manually copying a lot of things over anyway.
(Excluding NSEC-style enumeration, which is not always available.)
Spirit: ensure you keep a good copy of your zone files (bind format), their import / export has issues (it also doesn't include SOA or NS records). I spent time (before the recent fixes) manually validating records.
The one thing I wish they’d support is multiple zones and an RBAC system to grant certain users access to specific zones. If they’d offer that they’d be a serious contender to replace Cloudflare and AWS/GCP DNS
- Akamai DNS
- AWS Route 53
- Azure DNS
- Cloudflare (excluding personal/hobbyist plan)
- Google Cloud DNS
And many, many others. And I note the site you posted this comment on is using Route 53, so probably paid as I doubt their query volume would be in the free tier.
Paying for DNS for personal/hobby stuff is probably pretty uncommon, because like you say, most domain registrars will offer it for free. But commercial websites often will, particularly larger ones with serious traffic.
Otherwise, that is my observation also.
A good provider will have different locations across the world, and users connect to the nearest datacentre. The free DNS some domain registrars offer is, sometimes, hosted at one single location. If the server is in the US and the user is in Europe, you're adding 80-150ms to requests. If they use "anycast" servers, the user could connect to a server 1-20ms away.
https://registry.terraform.io/providers/BunnyWay/bunnynet/la...
[1] https://bunny.net/pricing/#:~:text=%241%20monthly%20minimum
> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend
At least when I do DNS at bunny, a leaked key can't rent VMs on my CC. And I prefer EU infra (cloudflare works great though for this usecase). Who knows that my bunny account can grow into ;)
648 queries/second/location.
Obviously not all locations are equal and not all seconds or minutes of the day are.
Indeed an impressive scale.
Quote “ At bunny.net, our mission has always been ambitious but focused: help make the internet hop faster.
To do that, we’ve built a massive global network spanning 119 locations and counting. Today, this network powers over 1.5 million websites and consistently delivers some of the fastest content delivery around the globe. But while deploying thousands of servers globally is an impressive feat on its own, the hardware itself does not explain how bunny.net is able to deliver such an impressive level of performance.
The real secret hides under the hood, embedded in the routing engine that directs every request, every user, and sends traffic exactly where it needs to go. That engine is Bunny DNS”
Ok… so what is it? Router? Dns? Software? Service? Upon reading again that para actually sounds a bit like AI slop, could explain it.
Compare with a recursive resolver, like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1, which you can use to resolve domains.
What's nice about Bunny DNS is that they have authoritative nameservers ~everywhere, so resolving is quick everywhere.
But I think in practice this isn't that useful, since if a domain is moderately used, its DNS records will be cached ~everywhere in anycasted recursive resolvers.
It's comparable to Cloudflare, if you're familiar with that, though Bunny is based in the EU instead of US.
This post is about their scriptable DNS service, which used to be paid and is now free.
All posts since then have come up dead, except for one about Factorio for some reason.
On a side note, Lapsa, you can test your theory about microwave transmissions fairly easily by simply going inside of a faraday cage. Simplest method I can think of is to go to the hardware/furniture store and stand in a metal storage cabinet. If you can still hear the voices, then it means they're not being transmitted from external microwaves - a microwave capable of causing the Frey Effect can't penetrate thicker metal like that unless there are gaps of ~1cm or more.
If others could please downvote this comment so that it goes to the bottom and he can see it, that would be greatly appreciated!
Saying stuff is free when it's not in the small print feels like a distinctly American Tech thing to do, which is an odd angle for a company trying to be an EU alternative to cloudflare.
That's pretty cool. Learned something new today.
Best wishes in your new business model!
"Appreciate it" or "Cool carry on"
I don't feel inclined to click either and exited immediately.
This is the cookie banner: https://i.imgur.com/CIBQBib.png
This is what you saw: https://i.imgur.com/rp6vbLy.png
The actual cookie banner merely says "We use cookies to improve your user experience. Learn more" and has a close button.
I suppose you'd have complained if there were no cookie banner as well?
I mean, that cookie popup saying there's no need for a cookie popup is probably there because someone complained there's no cookie popup...
"Appreciate it" / "cool carry on"
Is exactly the sort of confusing non choice options cookie banners give. Along the lines of
"Accept all" / "more information"
Then I'll retract my claim but it is bad UX to make a popup on the landing page that looks like an evil cookie banner.
This is smart. Ensures you have valid payment information, which implies a financial institution is running KYC on your customer. That reduces fraud and abuse while also reducing friction for real users to increase their spend within your ecosystem when a new product catches their eye.
What the hell am I missing here?
'Its free until its not haha!'
Especially if private equity gets their hands on buying Bunny.net.
