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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
- MrAlex94 8mo agoI’ve found Scaleway really good, I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more often here. If it matters, I didn’t go to them because they were specifically an EU org either - when Packet became Equinix Metal and then that got shut down, SCW were the most equivalent in terms of cost / hardware specifications and I often used them in parallel when Packet was still around so as to not have all my eggs in one basket.
- adamas 8mo agoI really like Scaleway too ! I went with them because Linode got bought and I thought, since I was moving my things anyway, let's go to a French provider. And I got a bad experience with OVH, so Scaleway it was. But really, I wonder why it's not used more ? Price are maybe a bit high for some things ?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- willy__ 8mo agoI asked myself the same thing, trustpilot is pretty rough on them and a lot of people tell you online to stay away from them. I also had very good support experience so far. Their shared TEM IP had some deliverability issues at times, but they seem to have cracked down on this recently. I am on dedicated IP now, so I can't really judge if there have been improvements.
- tcldr 8mo agoPrice would be a bit more bearable if their reserved instance discounts were more generous
- reddalo 8mo ago+1 for bad experience with OVH, their control panel is a mess (only the Italian provider Aruba is probably worse) and their backend is riddled with bugs. If something is broken in the control panel, the support team candidly invites you to do it via their APIs instead.
- bluebarbet 8mo agoAnother bad experience with OVH here. In fact not bad but catastrophic. They enabled 2FA without my consent and then demanded a signed letter on paper by post to let me back into my account. Their online customer service was beyond useless and the nightmare took weeks to resolve. This after I had been a loyal customer for years. Just when I was preparing to punish them by moving, my VPS went up in smoke at that fire in their Strasbourg datacenter. "Oops, our bad", went the email. Beyond parody. It's almost a surprise to me that this company is still in business. With Hetzner now for several years without incident.
- speedgoose 8mo agoThey used to have competitive prices for a while, with their dedibox line. I think they are not as well known. It’s a bit of a side project of the parent company, Iliad. They could benefit from heavy investments and some more aggressive marketing, but perhaps it’s not worth the risk and a slow but steady growth is what they prefer.
- epolanski 8mo ago+1 for Scaleway, I've been migrating some of my customers on it and I love it's simplicity and reliability. Costs are also fine.
- xvilka 8mo agoCodeberg would make a better choice if we speak about EU source code forges. And Forgejo instead of Gitea, which is nowadays controversial project.
- willy__ 8mo agoI was roughly familiar with Github Action/Gitea Action compatibility and had a self hosted Gitea already... I found codeberg interesting though!
- BadBadJellyBean 8mo agoForgejo is more or less a drop in replacement for gitea
- adamas 8mo agoIsn't Codeberg only for Open Source ?
- ozgrakkurt 8mo agoGithub or other commercial alternatives aren’t for closed source either anymore. Putting closed source code on github is basically asking them to launder it through LLMs
- Epa095 8mo agoBut selfhosted Gitea, which OP chose, IS good for closed source. And codeberg is not.
- ozgrakkurt 8mo agoAlternative of that is self hosted forgejo
- darthwalsh 8mo agoThis is kind of backwards . GitHub's privacy statement [1] says > GitHub personnel does not access private repository information without your consent except as provided... Do you have any evidence that private repos on GitHub are being used for training? In the opposite case, if you have a public repo on GitHub then you should expect it to be laundered through LLMs :\ [1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/github-general-privacy-statement https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/gith...
- Aldipower 8mo agoFor domains I am very happy with ClouDNS. Anycast DNS provider with failover functionality. It's from Bulgaria.
- marwann 8mo agoMy European stack: - OVH for object storage, domain names and simple Wordpress websites - Scalingo/3DS Outscale for PaaS (looking for alternatives here!) - Mailjet used to be EU but they've been acquired by Mailgun - don't know if that's an issue. Brevo is okay as an email service provider but they could be way better.
- cpursley 8mo agoMailersend is EU and fantastic
- omnimus 8mo agoI got interested because i am looking to switch to european email service because of law requirements and i know MailerLite (their other product). But after looking at their site: "MailerSend is a United States-registered company." I understand they are based in EU but the main issue is that if they are registered in US then thanks to CLOUD Act afaik it doesn't really matter.
- cpursley 8mo agoMight contact them about it, their mail servers are in the EU.
- willy__ 8mo agoI think Mailjet is now owned by Sinch and Sinch is swedish?
- medgelabs 8mo agoCorrect. Mailgun acquired Mailjet, then Sinch acquired us. We follow the EU data standards of our parent company for our EU products, which include Mailjet and Mailgun EU. Disclaimer: I am a Tech Lead on Mailgun
- gostsamo 8mo agoSurprisingly sober take. I enjoyed the honesty. Thanks!
- mcbetz 8mo agoIt's also difficult to find providers for competetive large-scale non-transactional emails, i.e. marketing and newsletter mails. None comes close to AWS, closest comes are messageflow (PL), elasticemail (PL), brevo (FR). Other players like Scaleway TEM (FR) and Lettermint (NL) don't offer non-transactional.
- willy__ 8mo agoYes, exactly! Marketing emails are a whole other story. I was planning on mailjet - thoughts?
- mcbetz 8mo agoHave been using it for transactional mails, that was okay. Have not tried it for non-transactional, esp. not in 20+ mio/months.
- mfld 8mo agoUsing it for both transactional and marketing emails (but "only" for thousands of recipients) for some years. Could need some polish IMO, but the core offering is solid. Support is helpful, too.
- Aldipower 8mo agoI am at Lettermint for a month now, coming from Postmark.app (US) and I only can tell positives things about it, works very well and is reasonably priced. AWS SES does not work for me at all, the sending success rate is really bad.
- dylmye 8mo agoLettermint offers "broadcast" emails which is essentially marketing
- receperdogan 8mo agoWhat exactly is your goal in doing this? What has it brought you?
- willy__ 8mo agoIt was a mix of stubbornness and curiosity how far you could push this experiment.
- bdcravens 8mo agoCan't speak for the author, but freedom from US spying ideally. Additionally, not providing any revenue to a US-company that in turn pays taxes to a government that they don't support the actions of.
- s_dev 8mo agoUS admin is threatening the EU on multiple fronts if you haven't reading the news. Invasions of sovereign territory, dismantling the EU etc.. This is unprecedented and without merit and a lot of EU citizens and governments have reached their patience threshold and are choosing to buy elsewhere. The US has simply casually mentioned they could turn off all access to US digital services and products that we currently pay good money for. The concern is that they might maybe not all at once but I'm not waiting to find out that they're testing the waters with a single provider. So we're getting security and independence and promoting the EU tech scene! EU has better privacy laws as well. Before this the US was seen as a reliable ally.
- psychoslave 8mo agoDomain TLD is the one administratively completely entangled into USA system while playing a major role on the internet working as it does. ICANN should definitely be an international entity, like UNESCO. All other points are "mere" technical gaps.
- willy__ 8mo agoI am still baffled.. compare a domain like .party or .parts between porkbun or your major US based providers and a EU based registrar of your choosing.... It's not pretty, at least it wasn't to me.
- LeonidasXIV 8mo agoPorkbun has .party for $21.09 (bar the first year promotion, not sure about VAT) and INWX (DE, VAT included) has it 32.80€ . It is definitely more but not as scary as you made it sound.
- willy__ 8mo agoWow, gotta check out INWX. I am paying in the 50s now..so double the cost..No VAT at porkbun!
- tecleandor 8mo agoI'm on INWX but trying to get out, as pricing is quite expensive for regular TLDs. A .com domain goes for about €18 with taxes and all that stuff. And the situation for autorenewal is terrible. At least when using their Spanish site (inwx.es) they cannot do autorenewal billed directly to your credit card or Paypal account, you have to previously add credit to your account "balance" and leave it hanging there until your next renewal. Somebody mentioned openprovider.com and I'm taking a look because it looks interesting.
- stayallive 8mo agoIt’s not all bad. I hope you don’t mind tooting my own horn. But there are providers who try to keep prices reasonable: https://domain.chief.app/pricing https://domain.chief.app/pricing (disclaimer: this is mine) I must say though that this (at this stage) is mostly only possible because a few (also Dutch) reseller titans that allow me to be affordable. The cost of entry as registrar into ICANN TLDs is pretty high
- stackbutterflow 8mo agoIn conclusion from the `What you realistically can't avoid` section is that running entirely on non american services will never happen. Unless some entity pours hundreds of billions (trillions?) of euros into solving this over multiple decades there will be no way to replace google ads and sign in with google/apple. The AI part seems to be the easiest thing to solve in the list, that says something.
- willy__ 8mo agoYeah, they sell you that with the devices. You would need to crack iOS/Android dominance first before you could realistically consider NOT assuming someone has at least one or the other account.
- yoavm 8mo agoBillions of euros over multiple decades? Why? Seems to me like it's mainly regulation. The thing that makes people in China, or Russia, for example, not use Google - isn't that Yandex / Baidu got tons of investments. It is that people can't easily access Google. If the EU decides to pull the switch (or if the US decides to do so), we have enough competence people here to build a search engine.
- usrnm 8mo agoGoogle was freely available in Russia up until 2022 and Yandex still had a larger market share. It really was a solid competitor to Google, much better than anything the EU ever had.
- okanat 8mo agoThat's where democratic governments at a disadvantage. Europe is also more integrated into US market. For example, killing access to Google ads ecosystem will make 100s of thousands or even millions of people unemployed. Apple and Google have multiple offices in Europe. A divorce with US will again make a huge amount of people lose their very high paying jobs. Unlike China and Russia those people can vote. Moreover, in democracies companies from other countries usually get more say and have more lobbying power. Open market system gives more decision powers to global players. Whereas in China or Russia, if you are not serving the goals of the dictatorial rule, you get ousted permanently without a fear of elections.
- Daegalus 8mo agoGreat post, I did a similar switch mid last year. Hetzner was something I already used, so I just doubled down. I have a single OVH instance where I ma playing with Openclaw, but that was because I was having issues with Hetzner that day on their new instance page (was fixed the next day) I use Bunny for my CDN, I just wish they have the capabilityt to route IPv4 and IPv6 traffic to IPv6 only origins. If your origin doesn't have IPv4, it wont route IPv4 to an IPv6 origin. Something Cloudflare could do. Still a shame its not a high priority. For Domains, I am still on porkbun, but i have like 20 domains, and moving them to EU registrars would be pricey. I will do it, just not looking forward to it. Also there are few registrars tht handle all the TLDs i have, nothing like Porkbun. I use dot.bs to optimize my registrars and keep track of them. I self-host a lot, but I haven't done github. I have a Forgejo instance with working CI/CD, but there are some painpoints mirroring 100s of repos and updating PATs. Also I minimize how much critical infra I host. I do it as my day job. Don't want to do it so much at home, and I still do some between NAS and self-hosted services I do run. I do plan to try out Hanko and Nebius, those sound good. and Hit up scaleway to see if there is stuff I want to use there. I know Scaleway can be pricey.
- the_duke 8mo ago[flagged]
- willy__ 8mo agoDo you have a source for this? First time I am hearing about that one. The German hosting CEO circle is pretty intimate and I gathered that Martin Hetzner is still around.
- Daegalus 8mo agoUhh, can I get a source on this? I can not find a single mention of this anywhere and it seems the company is still independent and German.
- ahartmetz 8mo agoI don't find anything about that - I think it's not true.
- OGEnthusiast 8mo ago[dead]
- bambax 8mo agoGood, honest write up! As users we need to make more efforts to move out of the American ecosystems. Cloudflare is just so convenient to take only one example. OT, about the finished product (hank.parts): the French translation and tone is a little rude. For one, it uses "tu" instead of "vous", which does have become customary on Social networks but is still a little bit agressive on a regular website. And "bagnole" or "balance une photo" is more than casual. Maybe the target are young people but I wouldn't bet on it. Average car ownership in Europe is 53, and 55 in France. Share of new vehicle registrations by adults aged 18-34 is below 10% in Europe. My two cents.
- willy__ 8mo agoInteresting. I actually had a human translator do the french translation because I didn't trust deepl/LLMs on certain languages. He was Belgian though. Thanks for the feedback, I will certainly consider it - I don't speak french myself.
- reddalo 8mo agoSpeaking of translations, the Italian translation seems fine but it uses English Capitalization of Titles, but that doesn't work in Italian. It should be "Pronto a trovare il tuo ricambio?", not "Pronto a Trovare il Tuo Ricambio?".
- willy__ 8mo agoThank you!
- Spixel_ 8mo agoI agree with them, the French translation is way too casual/aggressive compared to the English text. I wouldn't trust this website. It comes across as influencer speech targeted to edgy young people with a touch of "how do you do, fellow kids?". Pretty sure a modern LLM would yield a better one.
- RebootStr 8mo agoThe german translation is also slightly off. E.g. instead of: "Poste ein Foto und lass die Community dir passende Angebote schicken" you would probably write: "Poste ein Foto und lasse dir passende Angebote von der Community schicken" And you do not send an "Angebot" to a doorstep. A German would interpret this as the offer in written form send to the doorstep (not the part as probably intended)
- Misteur-Z 8mo ago* Scaleway is totally painful/scary on data encryption at rest and in transit, does not feel like your infra/data is isolated from other customers * OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help big companies going in, they are going somewhere on the SaaS On most European cloud providers I feel like IAM is crap: workload identity is almost non-existent, API keys management is usually hellish. Same goes for encryption/isolation. I want to hear more technical feedback on most of them, devil is in the details !
- willy__ 8mo agoI found scaleway's IAM system pretty solid so far. Right balance between "gives you nightmares" (GCP) and "one key to rule them all" (Hetzner.. Bunny.. and so many others)
- alpineman 8mo agoScaleway is so close to being a great product but they need to hire a really visionary Product leader
- thorin 8mo agoCan you expand on the Scaleway comment? Would be interested in the details. Also aren't their data centres all in the Paris area? Do they have any geo-redundancy?
- paffdragon 8mo agoI was kind of interested in the content, but I am so overloaded with AI slop by now, that reading this generated text gives me nausea. I was looking to see why they landed on this stack, but there are no alternatives or evaluation criteria listed - given the generated article, I wonder how much of the infra was selected by an LLM.
- willy__ 8mo agoClaude helped write the article. It is 2026. I proof read it though and yes, giving an LLM a list of specific criteria of what you are looking for in a product is actually a pretty good experience.
- paffdragon 8mo agoIf it works for you, it works. I just see the same phrases used repeatedly so frequently nowdays - including my own LLM conversations. Regarding the use of LLM for picking infra. The issue I usually have with such task is that they frequently omit things - either from the list of options or the features compared. And depending on my familiarity with the topic, I might never notice, which might steer my decision making into a different direction. Basically a certain bias. Sometimes prompting it to repeat reveals more, but ultimately I end up hitting the search and doing my own research, then I might use the LLM again with now more knolwedge and data. Did you run into this too? What was your process?
- willy__ 8mo agoI do understand what you mean with bias.. some models where quite stubbornly ignoring things like "I want made in EU - not GDRP compliant - not one office or data center in the EU". I remember this being especially painful for TEM and market email providers. Usually they suck at finding the right pricing data at first try.. so I ended up throwing screenshots of pricing pages. Now that I am writing this up, in some instances manually comparing them would have been faster :D ... The bias might come from the huge amount of US dominance in training data and might not even be intentional. In some niches you don't have many options, that's what I tried leaning on in the article.
- Tiberium 8mo agoDid you use a European LLM to write this article? Or was it an American one in the end? :) EDIT: Looks like it's an American one in the end, oh well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085756
- TrackerFF 8mo agoHere in Norway (and probably Sweden, too) BankID is a widely used authentication system, and most domestic services will use that as a auth / login. Only "drawback" is that it requires 2FA, which is quite trivial today. But there are still tons of users that want their "login with FB / Google / etc.". And a last but: If using such auth systems, one would have to account for all the different systems unique to countries. Maybe some larger EU-specific ID / auth system would make sense?
- yoavm 8mo agoSounds like the EU Digital Identity Wallet project: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/overview https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
- lysace 8mo agoDevelopment happens on Github, (perhaps) ironically. https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet
- wvh 8mo agoMany European countries have decent authentication, banking and payment system alternatives or even innovative solutions. I think, like usually, it's just a problem to break out of national or regional circles into something pan-European. A lot of people seem to agree that relying on a handful of too powerful American companies, especially in the ad and social media space, is a terrible idea and running foul of privacy requirements. Remains to be seen if some larger alternatives manage to pop up though. The European landscape is pretty fragmented.
- throwaway063_1 8mo agoThere are companies such as Signicat, Scrive and others that provide an API that integrates with different national authentication providers.
- worldsayshi 8mo ago
- palata 8mo ago> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.
- willy__ 8mo agoPeople usually have either one or the other account already, because it came with their smartphone. It is friction less from their point of view.
- palata 8mo agoSure, but what the post says is not that they will go for the easier path. It says that if they don't get to link their account go Google/Apple, they will completely give up (it is a "conversion killer").
- willy__ 8mo agoWell.. it's the flip side of those social logins being known and proven conversion boosters. If you actively decide against them, you are losing a low effort tool to boost your CR.
- bjourne 8mo agoHeard of haveibeenpwned? You'll end up there, eventually.
- raffkede 8mo agoSeems this page is not eu compliant anyway since there is no info who owns it
- willy__ 8mo agogood catch, will fix.
- raffkede 8mo agoThat was fast! Saw u added it! :)
- PennRobotics 8mo agoThe finished product has an imprint (with commercial name, according to Spanish law). The blog post isn't commercial.
- raffkede 8mo agoI tried buying a domain on OVH and the experience was shitty was forwarded between different versions of the page GB etc and could not finish the checkout
- data-ottawa 8mo agoI tried to use their public cloud offerings and I got caught in a fraud filter for months. I signed up with my real email and real credit card without any VPN. All the staff could tell me was I should try to improve my reputation by paying for additional services for a while. The issue eventually worked itself out without paying for services I didn’t need and now I have a functioning account, but it was frustrating for sure.
- baalimago 8mo agoInspiring! I'll likely pursue the same thing.
- baalimago 8mo agoThere is an ongoing lobbying push for "Made in EU" [0] which is unrelated to OPs article. The winds sure are blowing towards European sovereignty. Thanks, Trump! [0]: https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/02/19/made-in-europe-plan-sparks-intense-brussels-lobbying https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/02/19/made-in-europe-...
- dizhn 8mo agoAuthentik would fit very nicely there and eliminate that one large bit that the author says he can't avoid putting on US infra. I am only saying this because he's already self hosting a bunch of things.
- Aldipower 8mo agoMy EU stack, works well and is cheap! Hosting and storage: Hetzner and Netcup Domain: ClouDNS with Failover Transactional email: Lettermint CDN: Bunny
- zelphirkalt 8mo agoMy advice and experience is don't use Netcup. They are abysmal at customer service. I once registered a domain with them, and hadn't even paid, but then couldn't get my account deleted at all. Even multiple e-mails did not help and they insisted on keeping my data until half a year later or so. They absolutely behaved like complete holes, and I will never trust them again with anything. I don't know what they do with user data. Maybe they systems are just so terrible, that it is a huge effort for them to go and comply with GDPR deletion request and then they just don't do it. Also their web interface doesn't allow you to delete your domain, even if you have not paid yet. So anyone could come and make some account and register a domain, but then not pay and they wouldn't remove it from their systems. The feel of their website is very antiquated and due to not being able to delete your domains, feels buggy.
- Aldipower 8mo agoI am using Netcup over the course of 20 years now and tbh never had any problems. Their customer service is very friendly and they responded quickly to me every time. Sorry to hear your story, but I think this is an exception? I had domains there too, but moved away because of functionality. But my main hoster is Hetzner for a decade now. But because of vendor lock out, I am glad to have Netcup too, especially if you consider the price!
- solarkraft 8mo agoI’m not exactly a user with advanced needs, but I have a server with netcup and never had issues. I also know a couple of people who never had any issues with them. I know them as cheap and solid, never even heard of a bad experience I think. Bummer they failed so hard at your deletion request.
- nickdothutton 8mo agoEnjoyable article, thanks. I'd like to see a section on "layer 8" (or 9? whatever we are calling it). The regulatory layer. There seem to be so many uncertainties in Europe (and to a slightly lesser extent, the UK) now. I think if starting another company I'd have to give it some serious consideration.
- willy__ 8mo agoI am trying to be on top of the legal stuff. I did start EU first with GDPR compliance and expanding to the UK was kind of low effort. Comparatively little changes are required. I might expand on that in a future article.. all that legal stuff was quite a bit of effort but I got lucky with my lawyer choice and felt very supported from them at reasonable cost.
- yread 8mo agoThere is also Data Act, AI Act. Not difficult to comply with but lawyer probably needs to look the papers over
- znnajdla 8mo agoThank you for this. I'm in Europe with an established SaaS that's been running in production for years and I've converged on a similar stack (OVHCloud instead of Hetzner). However, I've realized you can stay sovereign and independent in any jurisdiction (not just Europe) just by simplifying your stack and running a few baremetal servers in-house. Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house with power supply backup and networking redundancy and you're good to go to serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers. You don't need VMs: a single Mac Studio gets you 2–4x the power of m7i.2xlarge on AWS, and pays for itself within a few months of AWS bills. You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs (an unofficial Apple partner). You get free S3-compatible object storage with zero ongoing storage costs with MinIO (yes it's redundant even if you lose a server, and your hosting provider can't hold your data hostage by charging for egress). Postgres runs like a beast and is incredibly easy to setup - you get zero latency DB because it runs on the same machine, has access to lots of RAM and you're not paying per-GB or per-core. Managed databases are a scam. You don't need an Auth provider, just do passkeys yourself. And the great thing about Apple Silicon hardware is that it is amazingly quiet, reliable, and efficient - you can do thing like run headless browsers 3x faster and cheaper than on standard server hardware because of the unified memory and GPU acceleration, so you're not paying for CI/CD compute by-the-minute or headless browsers either. This entire stack could give you computing power equivalent to a 25k euro/month AWS bill for the cost of electricity (same electricity cost as running a few fridges 24/7) plus about 50k euros one-time to set it up (about 4 Mac Studios). And yes, it's redundant, scalable, and even faster (in terms of per-request latency) than standard AWS/GCP cloud bloat. Not only is it cheaper and you own everything, but your app will work faster because all services are local (DB, Redis cache, SSD, etc.) without any VM overhead, shared cores, or noisy neighbours.
- inferniac 8mo ago[flagged]
- danelski 8mo agoDid you try to register VAT-free by any chance? My first guess would be that you could have set the tax region wrong.
- honzabe 8mo agoThe article does not mention payments. I would be especially interested in a European Stripe alternative - this is what I find really difficult to replace.
- willy__ 8mo agoI am simply not at that phase yet... I considered revolut pay (UK) or adyen (NL)?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mkzet 8mo agoA lot of people are over romanticizing on Hetzner. The hard truth is that Hetzner is a great provider for bare metal machines and extremely competitive pricing, but it's extremely demanding to run production workloads there without a dedicated infra guy. Claude won't wake up in the middle of the night solving the things helped you provision in an acceptable timeframe. If you are serious about your product SLOs, hyperscales shine, and you can only accept the "cloud tax".
- willy__ 8mo agoare you aware of https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s ? I am using it and I can wholeheartedly recommend.
- BoorishBears 8mo agoHetzner is a very particular product. They openly cop to being "overly cautious" with even letting people open accounts because they're playing with razor thin margins: I wouldn't engage with an organization like that for serious production workloads. At least, where "serious" is defined as making enough money that paying AWS $200 a month for $20 a month worth of compute is worth it in exchange for an actual SLA*, paid support, and knowing that even if you drop of the face of the Earth, the account will probably run unfunded months before your users even notice. I've been bitten by using "quirky" tier-3 providers for savings on projects that really should have just ate the cost of a bigger provider. (* Yes an SLA is not a magic uptime guarantee, but it creates an expectation which is a lot better than nothing.)
- Aldipower 8mo agoYou know, Hetzner is around since 1997, the term cloud didn't even exists then. Or AWS... The only hard truth is something when I see my wife.
- deaux 8mo ago> Google Ads and Apple's Developer Program. If you want to acquire users and distribute a mobile app, you're paying the toll to Mountain View and Cupertino. If you said Play Store, then sure, though at least distribution on there is free. But you said Google Ads, which you really do not need to acquire users. Returns on Google Ads were already low, and have only continued getting worse and worse. I'm sure someone here claims to be a magician at it and believes they can get a fantastic RoI out of it, and I'm sure some can. But the huge majority doesn't. It's very much like day trading stocks. There's a huge number of other, better avenues for paid marketing if you want to do it.
- willy__ 8mo agoGoogle Ads does "kind of" work in the niche I am in, usually with low competition key words.... but I did stop throwing money at it. I am never going to return the investment per conversion... but if you want a search engine to throw your money at.. it is still pretty much without alternative to me.
- deaux 8mo agoIf you want to throw your money into a pit, there's a lot of alternative pits available out there. Happy to share my bank account, then at least one of us gets use out of it. > You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. Every one of those auth flows hits American servers. The silver lining: Hanko, a German identity provider, handles the auth layer itself, so at least your user management and session handling stay in Europe, even if the OAuth flow touches Google or Apple. You can at least put "Sign in with Spotify" first before Apple/Google - they have social login. I've even seen apps that have nothing to do with music offer it as an option.
- bob1029 8mo agoIf you dig one step beyond hetzner you should start to see that the whole thing is unavoidably global. There is no truly dominant monopoly holder anywhere. Who makes the photolithography machines? What about those weird Japanese companies that make chemicals and substrates that no one else can?
- drcongo 8mo agoFor anyone looking for non-US transactional email, I found https://mailpace.com https://mailpace.com via HN a while back and can recommend. Can't remember who the HN user behind it is, but they've done a great job.
- pu_pe 8mo agoThanks for the writeup. Does anybody know whether there are any European alternatives for Github that allow you to host private/commercial repositories without using self-hosting?
- anilakar 8mo agoRunning microservices on Hetzner is a risky move. Their direct internet connections rarely go down, but links between servers in their internal network suffer from intermittent failures. if you make your service reliable enough to be able to run on a single node, you could have built a monolith in the first place.
- aa-jv 8mo agoI think this is short-sighted - there are many applications where a single node is all one needs, and this is a huge part of Hetzners user base, presumably. A bit of anecdote from me, as a decades-long Hetzner user: I have personally felt no real impact whatsoever with their internal network suffering from intermittent failures. The downtime incurred by Hetzner admin I've experienced is measured in minutes, in my case over a 10 year period as a customer...
- Aldipower 8mo agoIf you build microservices you should always assume that links go down! So what is the deal here? Think about it as a feature to make your application more error prone. :-)
- kkfx 8mo agoEhm sorry but no. Sovereignty means you own the stack not that you just choose other suppliers. Build on EU infra means owning a machine room with some servers, having fiber optic good enough for your traffic and that's is. What the author describe is just a supplier switch still owning next to nothing.
- bdcravens 8mo agoPerhaps the term is overloaded, and a better one would suffice, but the bigger point is to ensure that none of their infrastructure is under the purview of any US entity, public or private.
- kkfx 8mo agoAre our institutions more "legal" or "reliable"? Honestly, it doesn't seem that way to me. Oh, let's be clear, the less I have to do with the GAFAM, the happier I am; Hetzner has shown itself to be a good company so far, as have several others, but if we don't start to understand what "ownership" means in the digital world, we'll never get out of the current sorry state of things. The average Joe understands the concept of owning versus renting a physical good, whether it's a car or a fork, but in the digital realm, they think "if I see it on my screen, it's mine", they just can't grasp it. If we don't start teaching this, we won't be able to have a society built for digital sovereignty and technical rationality. We'll keep having "communication services" that only talk to themselves, like WA, Slack, Discord, etc instead of those where everyone can talk to everyone else, from email to XMPP. Most people won't realise how absurd it is that WA only talks to WA, whereas even a basic telephone can call from any phone company to any other. Making people understand this is the foundation, which is currently missing even for many techies who get it because they have the knowledge, but only with a somewhat vague understanding, without really caring how to do things differently.
- AJRF 8mo agoI just signed up up Hetzner Their menu has: - Console - konsoleH - Robot - DNS When I click into Console I get an additional option called "Website" I have no idea what Robot and konsoleH are. Is it a prerequisite if you make a cloud platform to make your offering as confusing as possible?
- Aldipower 8mo agoJust try AWS! :-P
- willy__ 8mo agoHetzner is juggling quite a bit of legacy systems (konesoleH, Robot) around at the same time.. bare metal (root) is still on Robot, a system from the early 2000s I believe.. konsoleH is for classic website hosting and console is what oyu need for cloud. They are progressively moving over stuff to console now, DNS and Storage Boxes have recently moved.
- yread 8mo agoI like how when you login to Robot it says "checking if you are not a robot"
- vanschelven 8mo agoIt's funny that you say that because any time I sign in to one of the big cloud providers I wonder how anyone gets any work done there _at all_... But to answer your question it's the top one from the menu and then you get a page that couldn't be more clear (IMHO as a customer)
- piokoch 8mo agoAll of those considerations are driven by politics, not technical matters. What if in Germany next election will be won by AfD, in France by Lepenists (Jordan Bardella is going for the win in 2027 election). And next US election will be won by Democrats. What's then? Moving back to the USA?
- mgol94 8mo agoData sovereignty, avoiding monopolistic dark patterns by big American corporations and choosing local business partners that you can keep accountable is not political, it’s logical choice.
- Symbiote 8mo agoThe previous election in the US was won by the American version of AfD. We can see from this discussion that a small number of Americans moved to European services.
- croes 8mo ago> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." And then they cry when they lose access to everything because their Google/Apple account got blocked for some obscure violation of ToS.
- samrus 8mo agoIts a really good sign that this worked out at all. And the takeaways are enlightening - EU domain registrars might have some bullshit under the hood making the same TLDs more expensive. Might need to investigate - eu needs its own mobile app ecosystem, easy auth, and genAI offerings - - but interested to see why mistral wasnt feasible - other things need to be scaled up to have the community and maturity to function well. This come with time and adoption Id love if this took off. If more and more people did this
- zelphirkalt 8mo agoMistral seems great and offers great functionality and maybe fair pricing. However, I have used their LLM API (Le Chat?) in a project and unfortunately the API times out sooooo often. I had to add retry logic and have timeouts of 5 minutes and such, and sometimes there is just never a response from the API. If they could make that more stable ... (I am using their official Python client library.)
- dwedge 8mo agoHave you tried Mistral? Admittedly I've only used it twice but I was disappointed. It feels like comparing openoffice to word 20 years ago - does the job but at an obvious compromise
- apexalpha 8mo agoCool post, thanks. Though I would want to know how much cheaper Hetzner actually is compared to AWS? We looked at StackIT at my company and they were twice as expensive... Which was a bit surprising to me. I currently rent a full, dedicated AMD Ryzen 5 64GB ram server for €35 a month. Its amazing how much you can actually run on a dedicated machine
- thecopy 8mo agoSuper timely - thank you! Im in the process of moving the entire stack of my SaaS* fully in EU as well. Hetzner bare-metal, Talos k8s, OVH Object Storage for backups, self-hosted (for now) image repo. For now im still on Cloudflare for CDN, but bunny looks interesting. Using GitOps (FluxCD) as deployment strategy enables no dependencies on e.g. GitHub Actions. For one thing running on bare-metal @ Hetzner is insane value for money versus GCP GKE. Im a third of the running costs and get ~50x resources. The only aspect im struggling with is full-disk encryption. Although customer data is still encrypred with envelope encryption in the database, i want to migrate to fully encrypted disks (LUKS + TPM) sooner rather than later. If anyone has any resources and/or experience with this, please let know :) * Gatana AI MCP gateway: https://www.gatana.ai/ https://www.gatana.ai/
- dwedge 8mo agoUnless I'm mistaken you can install hetzner from ISO allowing you to use LUKS. You could use teng/clevis to allow it to automatically unlock (or refuse to, given certain conditions)
- yread 8mo agoI'm actually just looking into LUKS on Hetzner. I've found this - how to do it without ever entrusting any encryption key to Hetzner https://www.tqdev.com/2023-luks-encrypted-debian-12-server-hetzner/ https://www.tqdev.com/2023-luks-encrypted-debian-12-server-h... But it seems like way too much work There is this easy tutorial (that for some reason disappeared) https://web.archive.org/web/20260128114859/https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-2004-with-full-disk-encryption/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260128114859/https://community... and this on how to get an email when you need to unlock it via SSH https://dominik.wombacher.cc/posts/email_notification_to_unlock_luks_encrypted_disk_via_dropbear_ssh.html https://dominik.wombacher.cc/posts/email_notification_to_unl...
- sreekanth850 8mo agoWe use bunny.net dns for Geo DNS with their dns based load balancing for my websocket infra. They have awesome community and support is top-notch. Getting a response from Cloudflare community is like taking a lottery if you are free plan.
- anovikov 8mo agoWhy is there no European alternative to Apple app store? It's rather strange to me.
- lbourdages 8mo agoAWS does have a European sovereign cloud now: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/opening-the-aws-european-sovereign-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/opening-the-aws-european-so... Now how bulletproof it is in practice will be tested in years to come, I'm sure. But it seems to be using the same model as AWS in China where a local company licenses and operates the software from AWS.
- bdcravens 8mo agoThe Chinese version of AWS isn't the full offering, offering less than 1/3 of the services. ESC appears to be more complete, but it's not a third party local company, but rather, a walled-off subsidy of AWS in Germany.
- dominicrose 8mo agoNice try by them but the Amazon is still a river and "AWS European Sovereign Cloud" is an oxymoron.
- s_dev 8mo ago>Now how bulletproof it is in practice will be tested in years to come Zero chance the data stays in the EU. Just think about it for a moment. US CLOUD Act directly conflicts with EUs GDPR. Amazon doesn't want to risk losing EU markets but it can't lose the US market by not complying with US law. If these two conflict Amazon will side with the US. The savvy business move is to pretend to serve the EU market exclusively while privately adhering to the US demands.
- wtf77 8mo agoNice reading but what you built is impossible to use without registration. I'm not going to register if can't find what I'm looking for.
- vanschelven 8mo agoHappy to see Bugsink mentioned here as a solution for Error Tracking _and_ to not see it show up as one of the "harder parts" :-) Just as a FYI: if self-hosting ever turns out to be too much work, it's also available Hosted.
- bilinguliar 8mo agoUsing self-hosted Mox for transactional emails.
- fofoz 8mo agoWhat do American colleagues think when they read about this trend among Europeans to abandon their platforms?
- andsoitis 8mo agoCompetition is great.
- fofoz 8mo agoI wouldn't call it competition, given that here we are fleeing towards less advanced services for purely geopolitical reasons.
- RupertSalt 8mo agoAh, now you’ve captured the F/OSS zeitgeist!
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- hansvm 8mo agoIt seems smart to me. Our leaders are intent on burning it all down, and I don't think anyone should be shocked as the smoke starts to billow.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- flomo 8mo agoA lot of this discussion actually more about "use baremetal" or "put servers in your closet". HN tells Americans to do the same thing (and hire them to do it).
- ectospheno 8mo agoI go out of my way to use American services. It would be hypocritical of me to deny others the right to use their country’s services. Plus competition is always better for consumers so have at it.
- setgree 8mo agoPer "Choose Boring Technology" [0]: > Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while... If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use MongoDB, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to use service discovery tech that’s existed for a year or less, you just spent one of your innovation tokens. If you choose to write your own database, oh god, you’re in trouble. From my POV, the author spent their innovation tokens on a political commitment. I would not recommend this path to someone starting a company. It's hard enough already. Also, many American companies that might have been useful to the author were founded by Europeans, e.g. GitLab. There's plenty of European talent for making widely adopted infrastructure. If those companies aren't in Europe, it's worth asking why [1]. [0] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology [1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-tesla/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-te...
- vanschelven 8mo agoBut the argument is reversed! The more boring your tech stack, the _easier_ it is to host it anywhere (including Europe). So choosing boring tech is actually an enabler of this (and other) choices down the line. It's only "a political commitment" as long as it doesn't affect you yet; and from the European perspective I'd say "the affecting has begun".
- setgree 8mo agoI'd say from this author's POV, his commitments cost him in terms of headaches, costs, and time not spent optimizing for meeting customers' needs: > The parts that were extra hard > Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap. The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and developer experience took real effort. Scaleway's TEM works, but the ecosystem is thinner. Fewer templates, fewer integrations, less community knowledge to lean on when something goes wrong. The choose boring technology essay notes that as you get further along you might get more innovation tokens to spend. but when you're starting out, "not choosing sendgrid because they're American" is a token gone when they're most scarce.
- s_dev 8mo agoCurrently migrating from Digital Ocean to Scaleway as well, found this article informative. To assist others: https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/
- yanhangyhy 8mo agoI've witnessed quite a few attempts in this regard, and they're truly admirable. Although Gitea's trademark and domain are controlled by China. From a geopolitical perspective, such attempts don't hold much significance. The EU's future doesn't lie here either. It lies more in media control, profiting from balancing between the US, China, and Russia, and even continuing to extract raw materials from former colonies through low prices or unfair contracts. This may not be glorious, but it's what's been happening all along. A vast consumer market, the influence of values, comprehensive soft power, cultural control and integration of large numbers of immigrants, and so on. "Made in EU" will never succeed.
- jimmydoe 8mo agoThere are EU ad tech exists, wondering if one can leverage them? Mobile apps, can you try those alt stores?
- jamiemallers 8mo ago[dead]
- rmuratov 8mo agoI wonder what author uses for payments.
- BLACKCRAB 8mo ago[dead]
- artzev_ 8mo ago[dead]
- gethly 8mo agoI've built gethly.com entirely on my own VPSs, so i was concerned only with VPS providers. People actually might not know that Europe has orders of magnitude more developed IT infrastructure than USA, or China(Asia is actually quite a joke). For every one VPS provider in North America, Europe has 10. Not only that but there are all necessary services one might need - cdn, domains, dns, storage, payments... nothing is missing. I don't see why people think they "need" american companies, except the big three of cloud providers with their gazillion useless services. But 99% of projects don't really need cloud services at all.
- tucnak 8mo agoTruth be told if you're a European business, U.S. cloud providers weren't a good deal for a long time. Not since the advent of NVMe's and cheap 100G NIC's, well, that's for sure. Let's have a look at AWS R8 class, which is their most recent native instance type with real, modern I/O. Now, these are ostensibly powered by AWS Nitro 6th-gen networking, which is a 600G NIC. However, if you fancy NVMe drives (R8gd) which you do normally, you won't be getting more than 50G full-duplex. If you want to hit 100G+, you will need R8gn instances which don't offer ANY storage. So if your idea of data engineering is not calling from the 90s, well, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place mate! Good news is you can get PCIe 5.0 servers, I/O gear, and host it yourself for a mere fraction of semi-capable AWS bill. Bad news it doesn't matter if you don't get enough uplink bandwidth, no control over the routing table in the core routing infrastructure leading up to your WAN, or actual routers capable of hardware-filtering 100 gigabits worth of line rate per link. And you will need all these things if you want to at least try and match what Cloudflare/Cloudfront is doing from routing standpoint. (It will be much harder though to match them from the CDN standpoint...) DDoS protection is overrated, but it's not for reasons people commonly think.
- Hrun0 8mo agoCan confirm on Hetzner. I'm building a SaaS on it right now and had to request a VPS limit increase. I was so worried and carefully crafted my request message. I was bracing for a multi-day back-and-forth but they just... did it in like 10 minutes lol > The pricing is almost absurdly good compared to AWS, and the performance is solid. If you've never spun up a Hetzner box, you're overpaying for cloud compute. Yep!
- drcongo 8mo agoMy support experience with Hetzner has been first class, every single time. They're honest, responsive, proactive and helpful. My support experience with Digital Ocean has been abysmal, every single time. Our latest experience was a misconfigured or malfunctioning Valkey cluster, we provided a ton of supporting information, their tech team magically fixed it and closed the ticket, and their support people tried to blame us for it breaking. This is so standard with them that I posted in our Slack "emailed DO support asking for a technical breakdown of what happened, they'll reply in a week blaming us". It only took them a couple of days though.
- Hrun0 7mo ago3 days after I said that they are affordable they have increased the prices by 38%. I wil never say anything nice about Hetzner ever again lol
- kbanman 8mo agoWould love to hear about the same but in Canada - As far as I know we don't have any Hetzner-like providers here.
- stayallive 8mo agoI’m trying to do my part with Domain Chief. Becoming a registrar is pretty gnarly especially without very deep pockets (ICANN very expensive) but some great reseller companies (also Dutch) make it possible to enter the market. I’m not perfect yet and tiny parts use Fly/Cloudflare (Anycast / Turnstile) and Stripe for payments but the core runs on own hardware in a Dutch datacenter provided by Dutch companies.
- jurschreuder 8mo agoWe also switched to Europe it's now 5x cheaper and the servers are 4x more powerful. I recommend switching to European cloud if only to not have to think twice about getting 3x redundant servers with 32gb ram. Trivial for anything you'd buy yourself but it costs 20 cars on AWS.
- _zagj 8mo agoThis clown couldn't be bothered to write their own blog post about the suitability of European infrastructure and instead, ironically, outsourced it to a US-based AI giant, Claude/Anthropic. I flagged his submission for being AI.
- XCSme 7mo agoLove the stack you've built, really impressive to see a fully EU-based setup in action. For anyone trying to keep analytics fully European and self-hosted, I built UXWizz. It's EU-based, runs on your own servers, and adds session recordings and heatmaps on top of basic stats, so you get insight into actual user behavior without sending data to US SaaS. Like a self-hosted Hotjar.