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VPS in Ukraine: where the servers are and what to check before renting
The Ukrainian hosting market took shape long ago and is still one of the notable ones in Eastern Europe. It has local providers with their own data centres, resellers and international companies for whom Ukraine is one location on a list. A server in the country is chosen first and foremost for a Ukrainian audience: websites, online stores, services and bots used by people inside the country.
Where the data centres are
Most sites are in Kyiv: that is where the large data centres, backbone links and internet exchanges through which local carriers interconnect are concentrated. Besides the capital, servers are offered in Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa and Lviv. Lviv is often chosen as a western location with short routes to Poland and on into the EU, Odesa for an audience in the south of the country.
Not every plan in the table lists a city, and for a backend or bot it usually does not matter. If you serve a specific region of the country or the route to a particular operator matters, ask the host for a test IP and check the latency from your side and from your users' side.
When choosing a plan, pay attention to virtualization: some Ukrainian providers still offer OpenVZ, on which a corporate WireGuard VPN, Docker and custom kernels do not work. For those tasks take KVM. Ukraine is not in the EU, so GDPR does not apply directly to a local host — the national personal data protection law applies instead, and Ukraine does not have an EU adequacy decision. If you process Europeans' data, GDPR requirements apply to you as the project owner regardless of the server's country, including the rules on transfers outside the EU.
Reliability: what to ask the host
In recent years Ukrainian data centres have put a lot of effort into autonomy: generators, fuel reserves, backup links through different carriers. The level differs between sites, so before renting it is worth asking a few direct questions:
- how many hours the data centre can run on backup power and how often this is tested;
- how many independent external links the site has and through which carriers they run;
- whether the provider has a second site in another city or country to which a server can be moved;
- how often backups are made and whether you can download them yourself.
Whatever the answers, keep a copy of your data in another country. For a project where downtime is unacceptable, a sensible setup is a main server in Ukraine and a standby in a neighbouring country, for example Poland or Moldova. Other options in the region are collected in the VPS in Eastern Europe selection.
Latency and connectivity
Ukrainian networks are well connected to the EU: from Kyiv to Warsaw is usually around 10–20 ms, to Frankfurt or Vienna around 30–40 ms, and from Lviv a little less. From the US east coast expect roughly 110–130 ms. Much of the country's international traffic goes through European hubs, so latency to the rest of Europe is comparable to that of servers in Poland, but it varies noticeably between providers. Check it before paying rather than relying on expectations.
Keep in mind that under local rules Ukrainian operators restrict access to a number of sites and services, mostly ones from Russia. If your backend calls third-party APIs, payment gateways or mail services, first make sure from a test server that they are reachable. For projects aimed mainly at Western Europe or the US, a server in the EU itself is usually the simpler choice.
Payment and sign-up
Local prices are usually in hryvnias, and international providers price in euros or dollars; the final amount may depend on the exchange rate and card fees. Most Ukrainian hosts accept Visa and Mastercard, some take PayPal, and a noticeable share accept cryptocurrency, particularly international companies and resellers for whom Ukraine is one of many locations; crypto-friendly plans in every country are collected on the VPS paid with cryptocurrency page. In the table above the "Payment" column shows the available methods for each plan, and prices are converted into your currency.
Some local providers restrict customers from certain countries in their terms, so read the host's rules before paying to avoid having your account blocked after the payment has gone through. Give your real details at sign-up: an attempt to get around a host's rules with someone else's details almost always ends with the account closed, and the server lost along with it.