GUIDE · EU · GDPR

A European alternative to Cloudflare, with data in the EU

If you are searching for a “European Cloudflare alternative”, it is usually not about price: it is because your DPO asks where the logs are processed, because you need an invoice your accountant recognises, or because you want the WAF to not be a paid add-on. Here is what Paradarum solves — and what it does not.

Where the servers are

Paradarum’s PoPs run on European providers in EU data centers: OVH in France, and Hetzner and Netcup in Germany. When a visitor requests your content, geo-routed DNS sends them to the nearest PoP and the request is served — and logged — on that infrastructure. The access logs your statistics are built from are processed inside the EU, not in a “worldwide” region you cannot pin down.

GDPR without gymnastics

With a US provider, the international-transfer analysis is a whole chapter of your records of processing. With a European CDN that chapter gets short: the controller is a Spanish company (multistream.tv), processing happens in the EU, and the subprocessor list is public. The terms, the privacy policy and the subprocessors are linked from the footer of paradarum.com — no need to ask sales for anything.

And one prosaic detail that saves real time: the invoice is Spanish, with VAT itemised. No reverse-charge paperwork from a Delaware entity that your accountant sends back with questions.

The WAF is not a paid tier

Every property goes through ModSecurity with the OWASP Core Rule Set, blocking by default and with a paranoia level adjustable from 1 to 4 — with unlimited rules on every plan, the free one included. Rate limiting, IP, ASN and country blocking, IP reputation and hotlink protection also come with the account from Seed up, and TLS certificates are issued and renewed automatically with Let’s Encrypt. Protection is not the upsell lever: it is the baseline.

The plans, in short

Prices exclude VAT. Seed asks for no card and holds no surprises: once the 50 GB are used up, delivery pauses until the next month — no overage charges. On paid plans the extra GB runs from €0.008 down to €0.005 depending on the plan, and paying a year upfront gets you 2 months free. The full comparison table is on the home page.

An honest comparison

We are not going to invent numbers about Cloudflare, so here it is in plain terms:

• Cloudflare has a far larger global network. If your audience is spread across the whole planet and you need presence on every continent, that scale matters and we do not compete on it.
• Cloudflare ships a huge ecosystem — edge computing, a domain registrar, dozens of products. Paradarum does CDN, live streaming and WAF, all of it driven through a REST API.
• What Paradarum offers in exchange: data and logs on EU PoPs, a Spanish controller and a VAT invoice, a full WAF even at €0, and pricing that fits in a four-row table.

If your traffic is mostly European and your requirement is GDPR without transfers — the case for most shops, media sites and SaaS on this side of the Atlantic — that trade tends to pay off. And you can check it at no cost: the free plan is genuinely usable, not a demo.