A move west that had to happen
It wasn’t optional. For what we’re building, for the kind of teams that trust us, we needed full European coverage and one more independent failure domain.
We needed a third zone. But not just anywhere, and not in just any facility. We don’t lease from big-brand colocation chains or spin up cloud-on-cloud infrastructure. Our business runs on physical machines we own, sitting in racks we deploy, inside data centers that actually meet our standards.
That’s why we chose Netwise.
Who Netwise actually are
Netwise isn’t your average colo shop. They don’t resell space inside someone else’s Tier IV warehouse. They’ve been designing and running their own data centers since 2011, and they started long before that: two founders, a few recycled IBM servers, and a home loft wired up for hosting. That was 2005.
Image credit: Netwise
Now they operate three private data centers across London. We’re in their newest: London East.
The build is clean and state-of-the-art. Carrier-neutral, 256 racks across four halls, all designed and executed in-house. Dual grid feeds, 1.5MVA per feed. N+N UPS, N+1 diesel backup. Cooling via adiabatic systems – no refrigerants. Containment from day one. Real-world PUE: 1.17. At scale, with clients in production.
Image credit: Netwise
That’s the spec. But spec isn’t why we chose them.
We sent gear. Power was clean, fiber was stable and every single port lit up first time. Ticket responses were fast and their communication, direct. No intermediaries, no account reps playing telephone. We got to talk to the founders themselves and they were exceptional. That kind of operational clarity is rare.
Here’s how George Lisandru, our CTO, put it:
“It was clear from our first interactions that they know what matters to modern infrastructure teams: clean power, stable networking, transparency and quick answers.”
What this gives us
A zone isn’t a checkbox. It’s a real, physical presence that has to meet certain performance and reliability thresholds before we turn anything live. Our London zone brings three things we didn’t have before:
First, sub-10ms latency into the UK. Our Frankfurt zone is incredibly fast because it’s steps away from DE-CIX, Europe’s largest peering point. But it can’t beat the laws of physics and geographic proximity. For SaaS companies serving UK clients, for edge workloads running in or around the City, for any workload tied to regional regulation, this matters.
Second, another failure domain. London is isolated from Frankfurt and Bucharest. Different grid. Different uplinks. Different team. You can now build real multi-zone architectures inside our platform. Each zone has its own power, network, storage, and compute stack.
Third, better network diversity across the board. Netwise peers directly with LINX, LONAP, and Equinix. We’ve seen improved routing across multiple providers just by announcing services from the London zone.
Image credit: Netwise
A fully capable availability zone
Some platforms bring zones online gradually, rolling out limited services. We don’t do that.
Everything we offer is already live in London:
- Cloud servers (KVM-based, burstable or dedicated CPU)
- Dedicated cloud servers with 100% core allocation
- NVMe block storage with triple replication
- Object storage (S3-compatible)
- Load balancers with health checks
- Cloud firewalls and virtual private clouds
- Managed Kubernetes with full API support
- Snapshots and automatic backups
- Role-based access, 2FA, IAM activity history
- Full-featured monitoring, billing, and team permissions
You’re not waiting for features to roll out. You’re not stuck with a limited API. The London zone works exactly like Bucharest and Frankfurt: “properly” – as the English would say.
Zone-level replication and durability
Triple replication happens locally. When you provision a volume in London, your data is written to three different NVMe devices, across separate nodes. It’s fast, fault-tolerant and self-healing. One disk fails? We serve the other two. Two fail? You still don’t lose data. And the system repairs itself.
We don’t stretch this replication across regions. That would add latency, introduce failure complexity and break locality assumptions. Instead, we give you the tools to control inter-zone replication manually.
Want to snapshot a VM in London and spin it up in Frankfurt? You can do that from the control panel or the API. Backups too. You decide when and how data crosses regions. No hidden copies. No behind-the-scenes syncs.
But most importantly in this day and age, this keeps you compliant. Your UK workloads stay in the UK, unless you explicitly move them.
Image credit: Netwise
How it fits into our broader mesh
With London online, our platform now covers three major zones:
Bucharest. Our original zone. Fully owned and operated. Ideal for Eastern Europe. We run everything ourselves, end to end. Great pricing. Low latency across the Balkans, Moldova, Ukraine, and Turkey. Full control over infrastructure.
Frankfurt. Built in Firstcolo’s Tier III, state-of-the-art R3 facility. Steps from DE-CIX, which makes it one of the best-connected sites in continental Europe. Excellent for fintech, SaaS, analytics or any performance-sensitive workload with a German or central European footprint.
London. The new west anchor. Excellent for finance, SaaS and edge applications in the UK. Perfect for teams building compliance-sensitive or latency-critical services targeting London, Dublin or surrounding regions.
Each zone is independent. Each one is feature-complete. If you want to build HA architectures across zones, the routing is clean and the tooling is ready.
Welcome to Europe. Enjoy your stay in our sovereign, ISO-27001 certified, GDPR-ready cloud.
Why we chose Netwise
We didn’t pick Netwise because of branding. In fact, we liked the fact that they don’t do much marketing. Their whole model is built on precision engineering and direct operations.
They built the London East facility from scratch. They don’t lease space inside someone else’s building. They use their own staff, their own systems, their own racks. Power is dual-feed. Cooling is adiabatic. PUE is measurable. Renewable energy powers everything. And you can see the power graphs, temperature logs and even the original build documentation online if you want to dig deeper. Now, that… that is transparency.
And that transparency is important to us. Our customers are often CTOs, DevOps teams or compliance-sensitive operators. They care about where their infrastructure lives.
We do too.
A note on support and operational culture
Our support model only works if we know exactly what’s happening inside each rack. That’s another reason we don’t buy cloud from other cloud providers. When there’s an issue, we don’t want to escalate through three layers of abstraction. We want to solve it ourselves or talk directly to the person who can.
Netwise lets us do that. We’ve had fast, clear comms with their founders and engineers. Installations go as expected. Remote hands work the first time. If you’ve ever run colocated infrastructure, you’ll know how rare that is.
What our customers expect and how this helps
We don’t compete by trying to be cheaper than everyone. Or by having more products than AWS. We compete by being sovereign, owning the whole stack, staying small enough to support it ourselves and listening to the people who use it.
That includes:
- high availability by default
- all-NVMe SSD cloud with triple replication
- fast provisioning and scaling
- low latency inside the EU
- cost transparency
- no data egress charges for internal traffic
- generous egress included in any plan
- full compliance (GDPR, ISO 27001, 9001, 20000-1)
- real support from certified engineers
The London zone helps us meet these expectations with more reach, better redundancy, and stronger performance into key Western European markets.
So what’s next?
The zone is live. We’ve already seen production workloads launch there. Network performance is solid and everything has held under load.
We’ll keep iterating and adding more local peering. Expanding monitoring options. Pushing features that support real teams doing real work.
But this is already a milestone. We’ve gone from one owned DC in Bucharest to a full European mesh with three strategic zones within less than a year.
And we’re just getting started.
