Sofia Is Open: Serving Southeast Europe From Bulgaria

voxa.host now deploys KVM servers in Sofia, Bulgaria. From 1 October 2026 every plan in both server lines, the KVM VPS range from Ion to Titan and the CDN Origin range from Flux to Vortex, can be placed in Sofia by choosing Bulgaria at checkout.

For most of our customers the interesting question is not whether Sofia exists but whether it should replace or complement the location they already use. This article answers that with measured numbers, a short comparison against Bucharest and Vienna, and the prices.

Why Southeast Europe needed its own location

Businesses selling into Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Serbia or North Macedonia have usually hosted in Frankfurt or Vienna and accepted the extra distance. Sofia removes most of it. Measured as the crow flies, Athens is about 525 km from Sofia, Istanbul about 500 km, Belgrade about 330 km and Thessaloniki about 240 km. Bulgaria has also been part of the European Union since 2007, which keeps customer data hosted there inside the EU, which matters for the contracts and data processing agreements many of our clients sign with their own customers. Our article on EU data residency without Germany covers that angle in more depth.

Measured from the new server

On 1 October 2026 we measured the average round trip from the Sofia node to each of our other locations, five packets per target:

• Bucharest: 7.5 ms
• Vienna: 15.6 ms
• Frankfurt: 22.2 ms
• Warsaw: 27.4 ms
• Amsterdam: 28.0 ms
• Ashburn, United States: 118.2 ms

Two readings follow from this. First, the Sofia and Bucharest pair behaves like a single region with two independent sites. Second, Sofia is still within about 22 ms of Frankfurt, so a company with a central European core can add Sofia as an edge without redesigning anything.

Sofia, Bucharest or Vienna?

	Sofia	Bucharest	Vienna
Best placed for	Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, western Balkans	Romania, Moldova	Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia
Location fee on Ion	€1.50 a month	None	€1.50 a month
Round trip from Sofia	Local	7.5 ms	15.6 ms
Inside the EU	Yes	Yes	Yes

If cost is the deciding factor and your customers are spread across the whole region, Bucharest remains the most economical choice. If your largest market is south of the Danube, Sofia is the better address for the server that answers them.

Three patterns we expect to see

A regional front end with the database where it already is

Keep the primary database in the location where most writes happen and put the application servers that answer customers in Sofia. Reads served locally feel faster, and writes cross a short, predictable link. Our guide to sizing database servers helps with the primary.

An active standby across a border

A pair of servers in Bucharest and Sofia gives you two countries, two facilities and a 7.5 ms link between them. That is a comfortable distance for streaming replication and for a standby that can take over without your users noticing a change in speed. See pairing two locations for failover.

An outside view of your own service

A small Ion in Sofia is an inexpensive way to watch your production stack the way a customer in the region sees it, rather than from the same rack it runs in. The approach is described in monitoring your server from another city.

Prices in Sofia

The Sofia surcharge is identical to the one for Frankfurt and Vienna. KVM VPS plans can also run on hourly billing at the per hour rate shown, with a monthly ceiling of 720 billable hours. CDN Origin plans are sold on monthly, quarterly and annual terms.

KVM VPS	vCPU	RAM	SSD	Per month	Per hour
Ion	1	2 GB	20 GB	€6.00	€0.0084
Pulse	2	4 GB	40 GB	€9.50	€0.0132
Core	2	8 GB	60 GB	€17.00	€0.0236
Forge	4	16 GB	80 GB	€28.00	€0.0389
Apex	6	24 GB	100 GB	€47.00	€0.0652
Titan	8	32 GB	120 GB	€84.00	€0.1167

CDN Origin	vCPU	RAM	SSD	Port	Per month
Flux	1	2 GB	20 GB	10 Gbps	€13.99
Surge	2	4 GB	40 GB	10 Gbps	€25.99
Torrent	4	8 GB	60 GB	10 Gbps	€48.99
Cascade	6	16 GB	80 GB	10 Gbps	€82.99
Delta	8	24 GB	100 GB	10 Gbps	€118.99
Vortex	12	32 GB	120 GB	10 Gbps	€175.99

All figures are in euro excluding VAT. None of the plans has a traffic quota. The price calculator compares Sofia with every other location side by side.

What runs underneath

Hardware in Sofia: dual Xeon E5 2699 v4 CPUs (88 threads), 256 GB of memory and a two drive SSD mirror that survives the loss of either disk, all behind a 10 Gbps uplink. Every server is its own KVM guest with root access and the same operating system images as every other voxa.host location. Teams that outgrow a virtual server can stay in the city: our dedicated server range already includes Bulgaria.

Before you point customers at it

The Sofia address range is new to us and public IP location databases update on their own schedules, so some of them may still report a different country for some weeks. This does not affect where the server runs or how fast it answers. It can matter if a payment provider, a streaming service or a fraud check in your stack relies on IP country, so test that path before launch.

Getting started

Choose a plan on the KVM VPS or CDN Origin page, and set the location to Bulgaria. The Sofia fee is included in the checkout total. If you would like help deciding what belongs in Sofia and what should stay where it is, contact our team with a short description of your setup.