Helsinki was our smallest site when it opened, a single hall of dedicated servers chosen for one reason: Finland has some of the cheapest and cleanest power in Europe, and dedicated servers are mostly a power bill. As of this week it is our second-largest site, with a second hall, three times the dedicated inventory, and a new family of storage-optimised plans that exist because of where they run.
What changed
- Dedicated stock tripled. The second hall adds racks of Ryzen 9950X and EPYC servers, all with mirrored NVMe and the same 10 Gbps uplinks as Frankfurt. The stock counts on the site reflect the new pool from today.
- Storage plans. Servers with 4 to 32 TB of NVMe, priced under the same 20% rule against the cheapest credible storage server we could find. They are built for backups, media libraries, block storage for your own VMs, and anything that needs terabytes close to Europe.
- High-frequency VPS. The HF plans that Frankfurt and Amsterdam already offered are now available in Helsinki, on the same 5 GHz hosts.
- A third upstream. Helsinki was the last of our European sites with two carriers; it now has three, plus the backbone link to Frankfurt.
Why Finland
The site runs on hydro and wind power under a long-term contract, at a price that is roughly half of what the same kilowatt-hour costs in Frankfurt. A dedicated server draws 150 to 400 watts around the clock, so power is the largest single line in its cost. Cheap, predictable power is what lets the storage plans, which are basically drives plus electricity, sit where they do on the price list without breaking the pricing rule.
Cooling helps too. The outside air is below 15 °C for most of the year, so the halls use free cooling for all but a few summer weeks, and the power usage effectiveness of the site is the best in our fleet.
Who should use it
Anyone whose users are in the Nordics, the Baltics or Poland gets the best latency here; Warsaw is 22 ms away, Stockholm 9 ms. Anyone in Europe who needs a lot of disk should look at the storage plans regardless of latency, since a backup target does not care about 30 ms. And anyone who wants a second European site for redundancy gets one that shares no carrier and no power grid with Frankfurt or Amsterdam.
What is not here
No GPU servers, for now. GPU inventory follows demand, and the demand for GPUs sits with the largest customer bases, which means Frankfurt, New York and Singapore. If that changes, Helsinki's power price makes it the obvious next GPU site, and we would rather say so than promise a date.