I found a Finland based Minecraft server called MinecraftOffline that is made for better performance for players in Europe.
It is running on version 1.21.11 and it has a permanent map so the world is meant to stick around. It also uses a custom plugin suite.
The server is hosted on reasonable hardware with an Intel Core i7-8700 64GB DDR4 RAM two 6TB enterprise drives and a 1 Gbit network connection.
