NODED has a new home in the Balkans. As of 1 October 2026 every VPS plan can be deployed in Sofia, Bulgaria. Pick Bulgaria in the location list when you order and the server is built there, on fresh hardware that has been running for less than a day.
This post is for people who run their own stuff. Below are the setups that gain the most from a server in Sofia, the prices, the latency we measured from the node itself, and two honest caveats you should know before you move anything.
Why Sofia, and why now
Until today our closest location to Southeast Europe was Bucharest. That covered Romania well, but friends in Thessaloniki, a community in Belgrade or viewers in Istanbul were still a detour away. Sofia sits in the middle of that map. Thessaloniki is about 240 km away, Belgrade 330, Istanbul 500 and Athens 525, all in a straight line. And Bulgaria is an EU country, so nothing about your data protection story changes compared to our other European locations.
Six self hosted setups that like Sofia
1. A game server for a Balkan friend group
Ping decides whether a match feels fair. If your squad is spread across Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and North Macedonia, a VPS in Sofia puts the server in the middle of the group instead of making everyone reach Frankfurt. Our Minecraft server guide shows how to size one.
2. A media server for family in the region
Jellyfin or a similar media server works best close to the people pressing play. Parents in Plovdiv and cousins in Thessaloniki get a shorter path, and the traffic is unmetered, so a busy weekend of movies is not a billing event. Start with the Jellyfin on a VPS guide.
3. A backup target next door to Bucharest
Sofia answers Bucharest in 7.5 ms. That is close enough for a restic or Borg repository to receive nightly backups quickly, and far enough that a problem in one city does not touch the other. The backup target walkthrough covers the setup.
4. The second half of a failover pair
Run your main box in Bucharest or Vienna and keep a warm standby in Sofia. With round trips this short, replication stays nearly current, and switching over does not mean moving your users to the other side of the continent. Our two server failover guide explains the pattern.
5. An uptime probe from the south east
If all of your monitoring runs from Western Europe, you only find out that Balkan visitors cannot reach you when one of them complains. A small VPS in Sofia running Uptime Kuma or a plain cron job closes that gap. See distributed uptime monitoring.
6. Your own WireGuard server
A WireGuard endpoint in Sofia gives you a private tunnel that exits in the Balkans, handy for travel in the region or for reaching a home lab securely. Read the caveat about IP lookups below first. The WireGuard VPS guide has the full setup.
Plans and prices in Sofia
Pricing in Sofia matches our Frankfurt and Vienna locations. The regular VPS line can run per hour or per month, and the hourly meter stops counting at 720 hours in any month. Streaming plans run on monthly, quarterly or yearly terms.
| VPS plan | vCPU | RAM | SSD | Bandwidth | Per hour | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS I KVM | 1 | 2 GB | 20 GB | 100 Mbps | €0.0077 | €5.50 |
| VPS II KVM | 2 | 4 GB | 40 GB | 140 Mbps | €0.0125 | €9.00 |
| VPS III KVM | 2 | 8 GB | 60 GB | 180 Mbps | €0.0222 | €16.00 |
| VPS IV KVM | 4 | 16 GB | 80 GB | 220 Mbps | €0.0361 | €26.00 |
| VPS V KVM | 6 | 24 GB | 100 GB | 260 Mbps | €0.0611 | €44.00 |
| VPS VI KVM | 8 | 32 GB | 120 GB | 300 Mbps | €0.1084 | €78.00 |
| Streaming plan | vCPU | RAM | SSD | Port | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS I KVM Streaming | 1 | 2 GB | 20 GB | No per-VM cap | €12.99 |
| VPS II KVM Streaming | 2 | 4 GB | 40 GB | No per-VM cap | €23.99 |
| VPS III KVM Streaming | 4 | 8 GB | 60 GB | No per-VM cap | €44.99 |
| VPS IV KVM Streaming | 6 | 16 GB | 80 GB | No per-VM cap | €76.99 |
| VPS V KVM Streaming | 8 | 24 GB | 100 GB | No per-VM cap | €109.99 |
| VPS VI KVM Streaming | 12 | 32 GB | 120 GB | No per-VM cap | €161.99 |
Euro prices, with VAT added where your country requires it. No traffic quotas on any plan. If you are unsure which streaming size fits your audience, this sizing guide helps.
Numbers from the node itself
We do not like latency maps drawn by marketing. Here is what the new box saw when it pinged the rest of our fleet on 1 October 2026, five pings per target, averaged:
| Sofia to | Round trip |
|---|---|
| Bucharest | 7.5 ms |
| Vienna | 15.6 ms |
| Frankfurt | 22.2 ms |
| Warsaw | 27.4 ms |
| Amsterdam | 28.0 ms |
| Ashburn, US | 118.2 ms |
Under the hood: a pair of Xeon E5 2699 v4 chips with 88 threads between them, 256 GB of memory, SSDs in a mirror so one dead drive is a non event, and a shared 1 Gbps uplink. Each VPS is KVM with full root, so you can run whatever kernel modules and containers your stack needs.
Two honest caveats
IP location databases are still catching up. The Sofia address range is brand new on our network, and several geo IP services still place it elsewhere. Expect that to settle over the coming weeks. The box is physically in Sofia either way, but if your project needs some service to see a Bulgarian IP, test that before you depend on it.
Hourly plans have a bandwidth limit per plan. Traffic is unmetered, but the port speed on the regular VPS line ranges from 100 to 300 Mbps depending on size, as shown above. If you push video or large files to many people at once, the streaming line, with no per-VM bandwidth ceiling, is the better fit.
How Noded Can Help
Deploy a test box in Sofia, run your own pings and speed tests from where your users actually are, and delete it if the numbers do not convince you. Leaving a VPS I up for 24 hours comes to roughly 18 cents. When you are ready, start from the regular VPS checkout or the streaming checkout, pick Bulgaria, and the location fee is already in the total. If you want a second opinion on where something should run, open a ticket and tell us what you are building.
FAQ
Is my data in the EU if I choose Sofia?
Yes. Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, and a server in Sofia keeps your data inside the Union.
Is Sofia more expensive than Bucharest?
Yes, slightly. Bucharest has no location fee. Sofia carries the same fee as Frankfurt and Vienna, which is €1.50 a month on the smallest VPS.
Can I pay by the hour in Sofia?
Yes, on the regular VPS line. Streaming plans are billed monthly, quarterly or yearly.
Can I move an existing server to Sofia?
Open a ticket with the server name and we will tell you what a move involves for that machine. You can also deploy a fresh server in Sofia and copy your data across yourself.
Will my server show a Bulgarian IP everywhere?
Not yet in every database. See the caveat above. Lookup services update on their own schedules.