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As a European solo developer, I’ve switched entirely to European alternatives for all my infrastructure since the beginning of the year. Cloudflare > Bunny.net
by spyridonas 11mo ago
As a European solo developer, I’ve switched entirely to European alternatives for all my infrastructure since the beginning of the year.
Cloudflare > Bunny.net
AWS > Hetzner
Business email > Infomaniak
Not a single client site has experienced downtime, and it feels great to finally decouple from U.S. services.
- moffkalast 11mo ago> Bunny.net Ah yes, the place for RabbitMQ endpoints.
- buildfocus 11mo agoI've done something similar, it's worth noting Scaleway in the same space, for people looking for an AWS replacement more like managed services (equivalents to fargate/lambda/sqs/s3/etc) instead of just bare instance hosting.
- moooo99 11mo ago+1 for Scaleway. I also use Hetzner for most of my compute. But some stuff just really profits from using managed services. I‘ve used Scaleway‘s Serverless compute offers and managed DBs an been quite happy with them.
- moffkalast 11mo ago-1 for Scaleway, they were a really good deal years ago but have become expensive af
- tuetuopay 11mo agowell they're not comparable to hetzner anymore, both in terms of features and price. only their dedibox brand could compare, as it's the classic hosting approach vs cloud. for the hobby crowd it's a shame, for a corporation it's still cheaper than aws with the extra bonus of not having any tie to the us.
- graemep 11mo agoThose are all much smaller. Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not. In a corporate settings management will say "this would not have happened if you had gone with AWS". its the current version of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (we had MS and others in between). Hetzner provides a much simpler set of services than AWS. Less complexity to go wrong. A lot of people want the brand recognition too. Its also become the standard way of doing things and is part of the business culture. I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.
- amelius 11mo ago> Less complexity to go wrong. This sounds like a good thing.
- graemep 11mo agoIt is, in itself. It does mean that you get fewer services, you have to do more sysadmin internally or use other providers for those which a lot of people are very reluctant to do.
- amelius 11mo agoI bet most people don't even need the extra features.
- graemep 11mo agoWhen forced to use AWS I only use the extra features I am specifically told to or that are already in use in order to make the system less tied to AWS and easier for me to manage (I am not an AWS specialist so its easier for me to just run stuff like I would on any server or VPS). I particularly dislike RDS (of things I have used). I like Lightsail because its reasonably priced and very like just getting a VPS. S3 is something of an exception, but it does not tie you down (everyone provides block storage now, and you can use S3 even if everything else is somewhere else) for me if storing lots of large files that are not accessed very much (so egress fees are low).
- herbst 11mo agoBig fan of bunny.net as CDN, however Cloudflare is my "smart" filter for all kind of attacks, AI scrapers, malicious traffic, etc. Am I missing something or is bunny.net not actually a replacement for that?
- Stoo 11mo agoThey've recently introduced bunny.net Shield to add a security layer. I've not made use of it yet so I don't know what the coverage is like or how effective it is: https://bunny.net/shield/ https://bunny.net/shield/
- herbst 11mo agoThis is very interesting. Thank you for making me aware!
- benatkin 11mo agoThat component is what keeps me from using Cloudflare for anything. Not because it exists, but because the way it's run is terrible for the open web: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_niche_browsers/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...
- valevk 11mo agoHow does Infomaniak compare to Proton? I see they have more office productivity products, but regarding mail and drive?
- alecco 11mo agoThis is worth its own post.
- baaron 11mo agoAs an American solo developer, I am close to doing the same. These mega-corps are out of control.
- bananalychee 11mo agoOut of control in what way?
- spiderfarmer 11mo agoSame here! I also got a nice peak in my traffic, because so many sites were down.
- GordonS 11mo agoAre you using a US-based transactional email service like Twilio? Curious about EU-based alternatives.
- smashah 11mo agoThere are self hostable alts to twillio
- pydubreucq 11mo agoHello, You can test Sweego - https://www.sweego.io/ https://www.sweego.io/ We (I'm the CTO) are fully European Bye Pierre-Yves
- tacker2000 11mo agonice, im looking to ditch SES, one of the last services i have running on AWS
- albertgoeswoof 11mo agohttps://mailpace.com https://mailpace.com is fully European based and independent
- mosselman 11mo agoThey are based in the UK. That is technically Europe, but I believe for privacy regulations it isn't the same as a EU-country, but I could be very wrong. Would love to be educated on this by someone.
- albertgoeswoof 11mo agoUK inherited the same gdpr from the EU, so practically it remains the same. MailPace data is also hosted in the EU only
- supz_k 11mo agoHyvor Relay (https://github.com/hyvor/relay https://github.com/hyvor/relay) can be self-hosted. We are planning a cloud version for 2026. (I am a co-founder)
- nonethewiser 11mo agoAWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them. You can use whatever infrastructure you want for whatever reason, but you may not have an accurate picture of the availability.
- monooso 11mo ago> AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them. This may be true over a long enough timeframe, but GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year. That is clearly better than both AWS and Cloudflare during that time.
- count 11mo agoMy clients (extremely large) AWS based infrastructure experienced no downtime this year. So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all. I don't use cloud flare for anything, so no comment there.
- monooso 11mo ago> So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all. Valid. I should have made it clear that I meant "clearly better from GP's perspective."
- nonethewiser 11mo agoClearly better than what though?
- nonethewiser 11mo ago>GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year That's the least useful information. What matters for his service availability is what he should expect going forward. What matters for reviewing his decision making process is what he should have expected at the time of choosing service providers.
- INTPenis 11mo agoDo you have anything for device management? Like managing local admin accounts on Linux, Macintosh and Windows? I'm afraid we'll have to use InTune.
- sp4cec0wb0y 11mo agoAmerican solo developer here. Moved to Hetzner two months ago. They have servers in Oregon for west coast people. My storage box is in Germany but that is okay, it is for backups.
- lilydjwg 11mo agoEarlier this year, a Hetzner server I manage was shutdown, and after I started it via the console, it booted to a rescue system. In the same month, it was rebooted without a reason. There was some maintenance notice but the server was not listed as impacted. Note that I'm not saying Hetzner is bad. Just incidents happen in Europe too. The server didn't have a lot of issues like this over the years.
- supz_k 11mo agoWe are also looking to migrate off Cloudflare. I thought Bunny.net was mostly a pure CDN, not a reverse proxy like Cloudflare. Am I wrong? One of the most important things for us would be DDoS protection.
- cortesoft 11mo agoI feel like a year is too short a time frame to measure reliability.
- everdev 11mo agoWow looks like you don't have one of the most renowned benefits of capitalism: over-reliance on corporatist infrastructure.
- richardreeze 10mo agoAren't costs higher though?