Muze

Muze has been part of the Dutch web's evolution since 1998. The company started out as a web hosting provider and went on to build content management systems for Dutch municipalities, including the Enschede Municipality. Over time, Muze made a deliberate shift: it stepped away from hosting and CMS development to become a software consultancy, helping organizations and developers move forward with SOLID.

SOLID is a project initiated by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Its core idea is to separate the three building blocks of a web application — identity, application, and data — so that no single party controls all of them at once. Where traditional platforms bundle a user's identity, the software they use, and the data they generate into one closed system, SOLID breaks that model apart. Identity, application logic, and data storage become independent, interoperable components, governed by open specifications and protocols that change how web applications are built and deployed.

That separation creates a gap in the market that few are willing to fill. As lead developer Yvo Brevoort puts it, everyone wants to build applications, but almost no one wants to take on application data storage — because storage is sensitive, and it's a frequent target for attacks. A small number of storage providers have chosen to approach this differently, and Muze has positioned itself among them: today, Muze provides secure data storage for SaaS companies and web applications built on SOLID principles, addressing the part of the stack that the rest of the market tends to avoid.

Running SOLID-based projects comes with a clear set of infrastructure requirements. Muze needed data storage that is safe and secure by default, a fast and reliable network, and the ability to scale up without friction. Because Muze's role is to provide the underlying data layer for a large number of SaaS platforms and web applications, the team specifically needed good, dependable bare-metal servers rather than a shared or virtualized setup.

Security sits at the center of every decision. Muze is holding other people's data, and that's a responsibility the team takes seriously — which made finding a reliable, dedicated server provider the biggest priority. In November 2025, Muze began working with NovoServe to meet these requirements.

Muze already knew NovoServe as a company before the partnership began, which made the decision easier. But the choice was also a technical one. For SOLID workloads, virtual machines simply don't deliver enough performance — they may be sufficient for simple services, but they fall short for the kind of infrastructure Muze needs to run reliably at scale.

Cost was just as important as performance. One of Muze's clients is scaling across the Netherlands with ambitions to reach millions of users — potentially two million — within the next one to two years. Running that kind of growth on virtual machines would become prohibitively expensive as usage scales up. Dedicated, bare-metal infrastructure is more cost-effective over the long run, and long-term thinking is exactly how Muze approaches infrastructure decisions.

NovoServe's Dutch roots were another deciding factor. Muze wanted a European provider, hosting within Europe, with more than one physical location — and NovoServe offers exactly that, with data centers including Delft and Oude Meer/Amsterdam. That multi-site setup matters in very concrete terms: when a data center fire disrupted operations for businesses near Amsterdam, it was a clear reminder of why redundancy across two physical sites is essential. With infrastructure split across multiple European locations, Muze can offer its clients real backup and redundancy — which, again, comes back to security.

There's also a regulatory dimension. In the Netherlands and across Europe, the conversation around the U.S. CLOUD Act and the risks of hosting data outside the EU has only grown louder. For a European business serving European clients, working with a Dutch provider like NovoServe is a meaningful safeguard.