Should I host on Combell, Hostbasket, Nucleus, or AWS Frankfurt?
Depends on your volume + budget + data-residency posture:
- Combell, the biggest Belgian hosting provider (Gent-headquartered, BE data centres). Strong on price (€30, €200/mo for small/medium Magento), Belgian support in NL + FR + DE, sovereign BE data residency. Less auto-scaling than AWS; more DevOps work needed for large stores.
- Hostbasket (now part of Combell group), SME-friendly Belgian hosting, similar profile.
- Nucleus (Antwerpen), high-performance Belgian managed hosting, well-known for Magento-specialised dedicated servers and ISO-certified BE data centres. Strong for €1M, €25M stores that want BE residency without going DIY.
- AWS Frankfurt (eu-central-1), if you want US-grade auto-scaling, RDS, ElastiCache, Fastly CDN. Not BE soil but GDPR-compliant. Cost-effective above €5M GMV.
- OVHcloud Belgium / France, French cloud giant with BE presence, mid-range pricing.
- Adobe Commerce Cloud (Frankfurt region), best if you’re already on Adobe Commerce. Auto-scaling, Fastly CDN, 24/7 Adobe support, < 30ms latency to Brussels / Antwerpen. Costs €25k+/yr.
- Hyvä Cloud / Cloudways Frankfurt, managed Magento, €200-800/mo, good middle ground.
For most Belgian merchants €500k, €5M, Nucleus or Combell is the sweet spot, BE residency, BE support, no AWS DevOps overhead.