“European provider” has become a checkbox. Plenty of companies rent a rack in Frankfurt, add a flag to the footer, and leave it at that — while the business, the billing, the support desk and the legal exposure all sit somewhere else entirely.
We mean something more literal by it. Every layer of this service is European, and each layer changes something concrete for you: how fast the connection feels, which law protects your data, what you actually pay, and who answers when you write.
Where we actually are
The servers you connect to from Europe stand in the Amsterdam region, and that is not a coincidence of real estate. Amsterdam is one of the largest internet exchange points on the planet: it is where a very large share of European network traffic is handed between providers. Sitting there means short, direct routes to most of the continent instead of a detour through somebody else’s backbone.
We also run servers in the United States, so customers on that side of the Atlantic get the same short route in reverse. Wherever you are, you are served from the nearer of the two.
The company sits there too. XS News B.V. is registered in the Netherlands under KVK 08145640 — there is no parent company elsewhere, and no third party operating the machines on our behalf. When you buy from us, both the contract and the servers are in the same jurisdiction as each other.
Shorter routes mean faster downloads
The usual way to talk about server distance is “ping”, which sounds like something only gamers care about. On Usenet it decides something much more practical: how fast your downloads actually finish.
Here is why. A download is not one big transfer. It is hundreds or thousands of separate articles, each one requested, delivered and acknowledged individually. Every single one of those exchanges has to travel to the server and back before the next can follow.
So every connection spends its time in two ways: transferring data, or waiting for the far end. The longer the route, the larger the waiting share becomes — and the effective download speed per connection drops, even when the raw bandwidth is identical. Two providers can both advertise the same gigabit uplink and deliver very different results to the same customer.
It is also the reason connection counts exist. Parallel connections are mostly a way of hiding the wait: while one waits, another transfers. A distant server needs a lot of them to keep your line saturated. A nearby one reaches the same speed with fewer, and holds it more steadily instead of fluctuating. We allow up to 100 connections, so you have headroom either way — but from Europe you will rarely need to reach for it.
The distance, in numbers
None of this can be marketed away, because it is physics. Light in fibre travels at roughly 200.000 km per second, so a round trip costs about one millisecond for every 100 km of cable — before any router touches it.
The theoretical minimum round trip from a few European cities to our location, against a typical US east-coast server:
| You are in | To Amsterdam | To US east coast | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paris | 4,2 ms | 58,4 ms | 14× |
| Berlin | 5,9 ms | 63,9 ms | 11× |
| Munich | 6,7 ms | 64,9 ms | 10× |
| Vienna | 9,4 ms | 68,0 ms | 7× |
| Warsaw | 11,0 ms | 68,5 ms | 6× |
| Stockholm | 11,4 ms | 63,2 ms | 6× |
| Rome | 13,0 ms | 68,9 ms | 5× |
| Madrid | 14,7 ms | 57,7 ms | 4× |
Scroll the table sideways to see all four columns.
Straight-line distance at fibre speed. Real-world figures are higher for both columns because cables do not run in straight lines and routers add delay — but the ratio between them is what matters, and no provider can improve on it.
The practical outcome takes a minute to check for yourself: run the speed test →
Or read the detail: speed, connections and limits →
European law, and what it gives you
Because the company is Dutch and the servers are in the EU, your account falls under Dutch and European law including the GDPR. You can ask what we hold about you, have it corrected, and have it deleted. Those are rights you hold by law, not favours granted in a terms document.
And your account data stays here: e-mail address, plan and payment records are held by us on European servers. The US servers mentioned above carry Usenet articles so North American customers get a short route — no customer data lives on them.
It also means the US CLOUD Act has no route to us — that law compels American companies to produce data regardless of where it is stored, and we are not one. And we keep no record of what you download in the first place.
There is a lot more to say about this, so it has a page of its own: privacy & security in detail →
Support in European hours
Our team works from the Netherlands, which means we are awake when you are. A question sent during your working day is answered during ours, rather than sitting in a queue until an American office opens.
You can also write in your own language. Our support answers in German, English, Dutch, French and Spanish — handled by the team itself rather than passed through a translation service. Those are exactly the five languages the website and your member area are available in, so nothing about managing your account happens in a second language.
Get in touch about anything — setup, billing, or something you think is wrong on our side — and a real person answers, usually within a few hours.
Pay in euro, with your own bank
Prices are set in euro. There is no conversion at checkout, no exchange-rate movement between renewals, and no foreign-transaction fee from your card issuer — the amount you agreed to is the amount that leaves your account.
More usefully, you can pay the way people actually pay in your country:
The full list is on our payment options page. A provider that only takes American credit cards is telling you something about where it really lives.
European consumer rights come included
Buying from an EU company means EU consumer protection applies automatically — not as a goodwill gesture we could withdraw:
The statutory cooling-off period on new purchases, in plain language on our cancellation page.
EU rules require the total price to be shown up front. No fee appears between the plan page and your bank statement.
A few clicks in your account. No phone call, no retention agent, no registered letter.
In over twenty years we have never raised the price of an existing plan — while retention, storage and bandwidth all grew.
The whole checklist
What “European provider” means when it is meant literally:
- Dutch company — XS News B.V., KVK 08145640
- Servers in the Amsterdam region — plus the USA, so nobody is served across an ocean
- Short routes = faster downloads, single-digit millisecond round trips
- Dutch and EU law, including the GDPR
- No US CLOUD Act exposure, and no download logging
- Prices in euro, no conversion, no card FX fees
- Local payment methods for eleven European countries
- Support in five languages, in European hours
- EU consumer rights including the 14-day withdrawal
- Twenty years in the same place, same company
Try a European provider
Pick a plan that fits your usage — every one of them gets the same infrastructure, the same law and the same euro price. Cancelling takes a few clicks if we do not convince you.
