US Vendors Dominate European Company Websites, with Cloudflare Leading Everywhere
Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors
We analyzed 19,450 European company websites and found US vendors serve the majority in the UK and Netherlands, and the plurality in Italy, Spain, and France. Cloudflare emerged as the single largest infrastructure provider across all seven markets studied, surpassing Amazon, Google, and local European hosts. While Germany and Poland show stronger domestic hosting, our data reveals that sovereignty discussions often overlook which vendors already control the internet-facing layer of European business.
The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack.
- jillesvangurp
A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives.
And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equipment makers was merged and acquired in the early 2000s. For example Bell Labs is currently owned by Nokia. It includes bits and bobs that once belonged to companies like Lucent and Motorola.
Another dependency is shipping; the US has very few ship yards left and is looking increasingly to the EU for things like icebreakers and some navy ships. Likewise, ASML the industry leader when it comes to making lithography machines used in chip making is based in the EU as well. And of course a lot of manufacturing uses machines made in e.g. Germany.
IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
- AznHisoka
I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companied are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure
https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which...
- karambahh
This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far.
It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes.
Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"?
Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect.
Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)
- LucaSiviero
As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products?
Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do?
Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs?
I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself.
I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff.
Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe?
I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?
- orbifold
"What it means and what it does not": article is clearly written by claude, which for me at this point means that I pay as much attention to it as I do to Claudes output: I skim it and then move on. It actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content. Before it would have always been the other way around. Whoever wrote the article would have had to spend way more time writing it than me reading it.
- embedding-shape
> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate.
This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites.
I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it.
> For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem.
Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...
- general1465
Why does that matter? If US vendors decides to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours. Same for git. Sure you can kill GitHub, but the git repository can be moved somewhere else within minutes.
However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.
- rukshn
I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts.
On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.
It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool.
Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.