Inside Our Lisbon Data Centre

Our Lisbon data centre, designated EU-LIS in the RANDHOST network, is the foundation of everything we have built. It was our first facility to go live, and it remains our primary European hub. This post walks through the technical details of the facility: what makes it a strong location for hosting, how the network is structured, and why we chose Lisbon over more conventional European data centre cities.

Why Lisbon

The obvious European data centre locations are Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London, and Paris. They are well-established, densely peered, and served by mature ecosystems of carriers and interconnection providers. They are also crowded, expensive, and geographically concentrated in a narrow band of northwestern Europe.

Lisbon sits at the southwestern tip of the continent, and that geography turns out to be a significant advantage for three reasons.

First, Lisbon is a major submarine cable landing point. Three systems terminate here: EllaLink (direct fibre to Fortaleza, Brazil, bypassing the traditional US routing path), Equiano (Google's cable running down the West African coast to Cape Town), and SEA-ME-WE 4 (connecting to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia). This makes Lisbon a natural crossroads for traffic between Europe, Africa, and South America.

Second, latency to the rest of Western Europe is excellent. Lisbon to Madrid is under 10ms. Lisbon to Paris is around 20ms. Lisbon to Frankfurt is roughly 30ms. For most European workloads, the latency difference compared to a Frankfurt-based data centre is negligible, while the connectivity to Africa and South America is dramatically better.

Third, Portugal is an EU member state, which means full GDPR jurisdiction. For businesses that need to keep data within the EU for regulatory reasons, Lisbon offers the same legal framework as Frankfurt or Amsterdam, combined with the intercontinental connectivity that those cities lack.

Facility Specifications

EU-LIS operates in a carrier-neutral, Tier III+ facility. Here is what that means in practice:

Power

The facility runs N+1 power redundancy. Every critical power path has a backup. Utility power feeds through redundant UPS systems with battery backup, and on-site diesel generators provide extended runtime during grid outages. Generator fuel contracts guarantee resupply within hours, not days. The result is an uptime target that exceeds 99.98%.

Cooling

Lisbon's mild Atlantic climate is an underrated advantage for data centre operations. Average temperatures sit well below the extremes seen in southern Spain or central France during summer. The facility uses precision cooling with N+1 redundancy on CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) units, and the moderate ambient temperature reduces the energy overhead of maintaining target rack inlet temperatures.

Physical Security

Access to the facility requires multi-factor authentication. The perimeter is monitored by CCTV with 90-day retention. Visitor access is escorted and logged. Cabinet-level locking is standard. The facility holds ISO 27001 certification, which means its information security management system is independently audited on an annual cycle.

Network Architecture

Every server at EU-LIS connects to the network at 10Gbps. Uplinks from the facility connect to multiple upstream transit providers through diverse fibre paths to avoid single points of failure.

We peer at DE-CIX Lisbon and DE-CIX Madrid, two of the largest Internet Exchange Points in the Iberian Peninsula. DE-CIX peering gives us direct interconnection with hundreds of networks, including major content providers, CDN operators, and eyeball networks across Europe. Traffic destined for peered networks skips transit entirely, reducing both latency and cost.

DDoS protection is included on every server. Our mitigation infrastructure detects and filters volumetric attacks at multi-terabit capacity, keeping legitimate traffic flowing even during large-scale attacks. L3/L4 protection is always-on. L7 application-layer protection is available as an add-on for workloads that need it.

Connectivity to Africa and South America

This is where Lisbon's position truly stands out. The Equiano submarine cable provides a direct fibre path from Lisbon down the West African coast to Lagos, Lomé, and Cape Town. This means traffic from our EU-LIS facility to our Johannesburg data centre (AF-JNB) follows an optimised submarine route rather than backhauling through London or Frankfurt.

The EllaLink cable connects Lisbon directly to Fortaleza, Brazil, with a landing in Madeira along the way. This is the first high-capacity, low-latency submarine cable to provide a direct Europe-to-South-America link without routing through North America. For businesses serving Brazilian users from European infrastructure, or vice versa, the latency improvement is substantial.

What You Can Deploy at EU-LIS

EU-LIS supports the full RANDHOST product line:

• Cloud VPS instances across all plan tiers, from single-vCPU development servers to 16-vCPU production workhorses
• Bare-metal dedicated servers with Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors
• NVMe block storage volumes up to 2TB, with up to 40,000 IOPS

OS templates include Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Debian 12, Rocky Linux 9, AlmaLinux 9, CentOS, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Windows Server. Custom ISO uploads are supported for specialised environments. All Linux templates come with cloud-init enabled, so you can automate server configuration at deploy time using user-data scripts.

GDPR Compliance

Operating within the EU means RANDHOST's Lisbon facility is subject to the General Data Protection Regulation. For our customers, this means:

• Your data is stored and processed within EU jurisdiction
• We offer Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) on request
• The facility and its operations are covered by ISO 27001 certification
• No data leaves the EU unless you explicitly route it elsewhere

For companies in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) or any business serving EU customers, hosting in an EU-jurisdiction facility is often not just a preference but a legal requirement. EU-LIS meets that requirement without compromise on performance or connectivity.

Visit the Lisbon Location Page

For full technical specifications, latency benchmarks, and frequently asked questions about our Lisbon facility, visit the EU-LIS location page. If you are ready to deploy, view our plans and select Lisbon as your data centre when you configure your server.