Zurich is the only site in the fleet where we deliberately refuse orders from people holding money. It shows as low stock on the location index almost permanently, and roughly forty times a month somebody asks whether that is a marketing trick. The answer is no, and this note exists so support can stop retyping the explanation.
The numbers
Rack space in Zurich costs us about three and a half times what the same rack costs in Bucharest. Power is a little over twice. Transit per gigabit is close to three times, and the gap widens rather than narrows as you buy more of it, because the local market does not have the volume to reward scale the way Frankfurt does.
| Cost line | Zurich, relative to our cheapest European site |
|---|---|
| Rack space per U | About 3.4× |
| Power per kilowatt | About 2.1× |
| Transit per gigabit | About 2.8× |
| Remote hands per hour | About 2.6× |
| Node build cost | Identical, it is the same hardware |
The hardware is the same hardware. A Ryzen 9950X node costs what it costs regardless of the postcode, which is why the price difference you see on the configurator is smaller than the cost difference we absorb.
Why we do not simply expand
Space is not the constraint. Power is. Adding a rack means adding a committed power draw, and the lead time on new committed power in that building is measured in quarters rather than weeks. We have asked three times since 2022. The most recent answer moved the date by seven months, which is the sort of thing you plan around rather than announce.
The site runs a 200 Gbit/s uplink and 8 Tbit/s of scrubbing, which is sufficient for what is in it. Neither figure is what limits new orders.
Why we do not simply raise the price
We did, twice. Zurich pricing went up twelve percent in 2022 and a further nine percent in 2023. Demand did not move in any way we could measure, which taught us something uncomfortable: most people buying Zurich are not comparing it against Frankfurt on price. They are buying a flag, and at some point charging more for a flag is just charging more for a flag.
There is a price at which demand would fall to supply. It is high enough that we would rather ration honestly than pretend the number is about cost.
What rationing looks like
A fixed batch of instances is released every Monday at 09:00 UTC. The batch size is whatever capacity the previous week freed plus whatever we have racked, typically between six and twenty instances. One instance per account for the first forty-eight hours after a release, after which the cap lifts.
No waiting list. Waiting lists get gamed within a fortnight by anybody with a script, and then we are running a queue rather than a hosting company. Renewals are never affected: an existing Zurich instance renews forever, and rationing applies only to new builds.
Metal in Zurich is quoted individually and is usually four to six weeks out. Ask support rather than watching the configurator for it.
The part people do not want to hear
Most Zurich requests arrive with a sentence about Swiss privacy law attached. That belief is doing more work than the law can carry. Jurisdiction affects what a legal process looks like and how long it takes; it does not change what exists on a disk to be handed over, and what exists on a disk is the thing you can actually control.
We keep an email address, a password hash, a seven-day panel access log and an invoice record. That is true in Zurich and it is equally true in Bucharest. If the reason you want Swiss hosting is that you assume everywhere else keeps more, read what we log and then pick on latency instead.
None of which is an argument against the site. Swiss jurisdiction is genuinely useful for some contractual situations, several of our customers have a defensible reason for it, and it is not our business to interrogate them. It is an argument against paying a premium for a belief you could satisfy for less.
Where to go instead
| If you wanted Zurich for | Consider | Round trip to Amsterdam |
|---|---|---|
| Low European latency | Frankfurt FRA-02, Ryzen 9950X only | 8 ms |
| A non-EU jurisdiction | Reykjavík KEF-01 or Chișinău KIV-01 | 39 ms and 44 ms |
| Southern European reach | Milan MIL-01 | 20 ms |
| Anything price-sensitive | Bucharest BUH-01 | 34 ms |
Zurich itself sits at 15 ms from Amsterdam and 92 ms from New York, so the latency argument for it over Frankfurt is worth about seven milliseconds. Decide accordingly.