A practical guide to replacing Cloudflare’s services with EU-based alternatives, covering CDN, DDoS protection, edge hosting, and why you might want to make the switch.
The current geopolitical landscape is making US partners less attractive for EU companies. This is happening from two angles: US legislative action may make legal compliance for EU companies harder to guarantee, and US geopolitical actions might lead to EU sanctions that impact service availability.
Cloudflare is one of the staple services in my infrastructure stack. Cloudflare is best known for its CDN services and DDOS protection. Replacing this aspect of Cloudflare is trivial. There are several EU companies that specialize in CDN, including BunnyCDN, KeyCDN, OVHcloud, and Myra CDN. Each of these have competitive pricing and good performance. Transitioning to one of these CDNs should be straightforward, it usually just involves changing DNS records and updating origin settings.
Most hosting providers also offer DNS services, so replacing Cloudflare DNS easy, too. But Cloudflare offers more than just CDN and DNS. What about the other features?
This is where EU alternatives get interesting. Several companies specifically market themselves on GDPR compliance and keeping traffic within EU borders.
Myra Security and Link11 specialize in DDoS protection and WAF services. Both are EU-based and focus on data sovereignty. They offer DDoS protection that is comparable to Cloudflare’s, but their pricing seems to target larger customers, with plans starting at several hundred euros per month.
The challenge with DDoS protection is that you need massive network capacity to absorb volumetric attacks. Cloudflare’s network is enormous. EU providers presumably have smaller networks, though I’ve not seen published capacity numbers for comparison. In any case, there haven’t been high-profile DDoS attacks that brought down these EU providers, so they seem to be doing their job.
For static site hosting, several EU providers work well. BunnyCDN and Scaleway offers object storage with CDN that works similar to Cloudflare Pages. You’ll need to set up your own build pipeline, but that’s not hard with GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
The Cloudflare Workers service is currently harder to replace. There’s no direct EU equivalent to Workers, but Scaleway Functions comes pretty close. Several other providers seem to promote self-hosted serverless platforms, on top of Kubernetes clusters. OVHcloud suggests using Rancher to manage serverless workloads on your own Kubernetes cluster. This is a more complex setup, and it shifts more operational responsibility to you, but it might be a viable option.
Cloudflare Workers is truly serverless: you pay per request and CPU time, with automatic global distribution. Scaleway Functions offers a true serverless pricing model too, and it is quite competitive with the Cloudflare Workers pricing. I’ve randomly chosen OVHcloud to represent the self-hosted Kubernetes option, as I feel they are a reasonable representation of EU cloud providers.
One of my clients uses Cloudflare for a moderately busy site with 10 domains. They use workers handle SSR for 160M requests. This queries KV 200M/30M times (R/W). Their Cloudflare bill is about $750 per month.
| Service | OVHcloud | Scaleway |
|---|---|---|
| CDN | $7/m (Security) | €13 |
| Load balancer | $17/m (M tier) | €58 (VPC-GW-M) |
| Serverless | $5 + $87, (Rancher + 3x B2-7) | €24 (160M requests) + €23 (8M seconds) |
| KV store | $45/m (Valkey) | €45/m (RED1-2XS) |
| Monthly total | ~$154/m | ~€150/m |
Are the numbers i’ve guestimated accurate? Probably not. These services are fundamentally different, so they are hard to compare. Nevertheless, they give a rough idea of the order of magnitude. These prices may seem lower than Cloudflare’s, but that comes with increased operational complexity and responsibilities. You need to manage multiple services, set up load balancers, and handle scaling yourself. While I feel that a company this size needs to have in-house ops capabilities anyway, it’s definitely a consideration.
These EU alternatives may not match Cloudflare feature-for-feature, but they can cover the core needs: CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, and serverless hosting. The trade-off is increased complexity and potentially higher operational overhead. On top of that, the level of integration you get with Cloudflare’s all-in-one platform is hard to match with separate providers.
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