I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
coinerella.com
coinerella.com
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.
There's also the matter that, ethically, openprovider seems to be heavily focusing on domain name speculators as clients; that may be a business many people would not want to support, and their services for people actually using their domains may be poor.
Do you have more info about that? I'm a customer of them and didn't know this.
I actually noticed that quite a lot of (smaller) hosting providers are also customers of Openprovider. (When transferring some domains from other providers to my account as Openprovider, they turned out to be internal transfers.) So I'm a bit surprised about it.
Some foreign extensions are quite expensive though. I happened to be looking into that yesterday, and Netim (FR) seems to be a good option for that. For the two extensions I need, they were among the cheapest with renewals.
It's not just foreign domains that are expensive. A quick check showed openprovider charges double of what other providers charge for .nl domains, and the same applies for other european TLDs, even .eu.
A quick check of their pricing refutes your claim. They do list cheap domains, but it's due to promotional discounts on the first registration that they follow by charging a huge markup in renewal fees.
Case in point, I have a few domains that I have been paying namecheap peanuts to maintain, and the same domains are listed in openprovider.eu to cost between 5 and 10x as much to renew.
Also no pricing and a "Talk to sales" only link. Which usually means super expensive, or B2B only. I pay like 10 cents a month on Bunny something
When I see "talk to sales" I just move on. I don't have time to waste on that.
I used to work for a business in a pretty competitive area, where tactics like fake DMCA requests and abuse cases are routinely used to attempt to take down information, be it from Google, or from the CDN/hosting provider. While at first Bunny support seemed understanding of it, later they unceremoniously blocked the account on the basis of too many complaints having been filed, despite all of them being responded to in due time and being proven false.
OTOH, their support staff would respond lightning-fast, which was a breath of fresh air compared to other CDNs we used before.
I could see myself using Bunny for personal projects, or some non-vital business, but probably not for anything with lots of competition.
for anything DMCA heavy maybe just buying dedicated servers or something instead could work?
It feels rather unviable nowadays to run a business without some CDN/DDoS protection service in front of your website.
so if you can just find a good dedicated server provider that won't cut you off, maybe that's a potential solution?
just my 2 cents though
I also use it to hide and protect my hetzner server.
It works well. My only gripe is the ipv6 thing
Other than that, maybe ads
How reliable is dot.bs DNS hosting?
dot.bs is backed by ClouDNS. ClouDNS serves over two billion DNS queries per day, so I can confidently say your DNS is in good hands.
Do I really get free email?
Yes! In order to make this possible, there are some limitations. A maximum of 5 email accounts per domain (unlimited domains) A maximum of 5 outgoing emails per hour, per account (to prevent spammers) A maximum of 75 MB storage per account If these limits are a problem for you, please reach out and we can figure something out.
A great thing is that it's almost fully compatible with Github actions, so migrating an existing CI/CD should not be too painful. If you plan to move, make sure to read this first: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/comparison#missing-feat...
For sure, it requires a bit of maintenance, mainly for updates, but that's all.
you ca see this on the footer of porkbun.com:
> Made in the USA
It was fine when I lived near Bellevue, Washington. And I did live 30 years in the US but I want to divest myself from that shitshow.
And for .com, .org, and .net those are owned by ICANN which is US controlled anyway.
For .com domains, if the rationale is data sovereignty, GDPR simplicity, avoiding dependence on a handful of American hyperscalers, then from an operational standpoint I don’t see much value in using European-based registrars. Ultimately, these domains remain under U.S. control regardless. If the focus is 'stubbornness' [one of the points in the article], then of course you have other priorities.
Personally I am all for data sovereignty etc, but very seldom for country boycotts.
If so, Nebius is just a fancy name for Yandex, beholden to everything that matters to Yandex LLC headquartered in Russia. They just chose a distinctly different name, presumably to avoid the association. When we were doing a deep-dive into cloud GPU providers, legal counsel veto'd them for this reason.
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.
With this setup if 1 or 2 Mac Studios fail (or need to be restarted for updates) everything just keeps running smoothly with no customer impact. It also helps that the app itself is on the Elixir BEAM (Phoenix) so everything "just works" across all machines.
You should probably reconsider going with it in 2026 unless you're fine with their new (non -opensource) offering. It still has a "free" license, so it might still be an option depending on your priorities.
But there are alternatives around, some being arguably much easier to run/maintain for small deployments like this.
While I definitely concur with your conclusions re VMs and GCP hosting overhead, did you benchmark a container based setup in GKE or similar?
>.. serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers.
What is your network connectivity like for this setup? Presumably you operate in a building capable of giving you fiber, with a fixed IP, or something like that?
That is not really a rarity these days. I have symmetrical gigabit fibre with a fixed IP here in a Spanish farmhouse 45 minutes from the nearest population centre
But they offer the exact same specs to business customers in the nearby town. I appreciate Spain is well ahead of most other countries on connectivity, but I can't picture gigabit + static IP being a dealbreaker in most of Western Europe
Only if you have physical offices and staff in every jurisdiction you're serving.
Yes, but not where my customers live. The whole point of "sovereignty" is to serve customers from a location that is bound by the laws of _their_ jurisdiction, not mine.
It matters who can physically take control of the servers. It matters where the encryption keys are stored. The storage and processing location also matters for compliance with data residency laws.
But it's not the only thing I mentioned. Having physical offices and staff in a jurisdiction usually goes along with setting up some sort of legal and taxable entity that has personally responsible directors.
The whole issue is very complicated.
You'll need business internet plans with redundancy and based on locations that might be prohibitively expensive. Some startups might even require their own AS numbers.
Also the connectivity to the data centers or cloud infra like WAF , CDNs etc will be definitely worse compared to cloud instances. Then comes firewalls, their configuration and their redundancy.
These things will matter if you're serious about your SaaS.You could definitely co-locate, but that's another cost, then comes the redundancy of everything, from servers, to disks to network (routers and switches etc).
I personally believe that modern hardware is pretty reliable and doesn't need redundancy in every layer, but most people won't agree with and when startups have enough money, this doesn't matter to them.
I think the only reason the common public is unable to start SaaS is handling and managing these problems. Redundancy costs a lot. And many startups don't want to deal with it even if it'll help them in long run. They just gather enough cash and throw at the overlords.
I do hope that the general infra should improve so that can properly host their own.
Nevertheless I'm still trying to start something in SaaS space and self host from my home...
MinIO took away the source, not the self hosting.
I fail to see the point of this when the system you've to decided to run "yourself" is entirely owned and dependent on another American company.
The difference between EU and US is that it's possible to make all components in the US, using US equipment, and so some companies do because it commands a pretty decent premium. It's not even that hard since most components (e.g. reference motherboard designs) are still designed and actually built in the US. China still really mostly does what you might politely call "commercializes US tech". And let's not discuss too deeply if they correctly pay licensing for all the components they make, because nobody enjoys that discussion.
And yep, as you might expect, only Intel chips, no Nvidia cards ... and that's not the end of the limitations. The previous version had no USB-C monitor support, never mind one USB-C cable to multiple monitors, but last year intel really pushed a bit harder. But even this year, I'd hope you're not going to be trying to use these machines for gaming.
The EU can't even make a modern motherboard's USB port chip.
Oh and yes, there are cracks in the US version too. The phones used, for example, are iPhones. Radio designed in South Korea ...
False. ASML is in the EU.
Right, ASML is so replaceable that the US forces the Dutch government to put export controls on some of their machines.
There's no substitute in the world for the top tier machines ASML makes.
That's because the critical EUV light source technology is developed in California by a US-based subsidiary of ASML. The US and EU have mutual interest in protecting the technology and machines. If export control agreements were not in place then ASML would have never been permitted to acquire Cymer. And if they are not enforced then the US would almost certainly require ASML to sell Cymer back to US ownership, TikTok-style.
I’m having trouble searching for this - but all the top results seem to be SEO or AI slop, so perhaps I’m just not finding them.
And while many (but certainly not all) of the other components could be made in the US, it's expensive and capacity is limited. So even the likes of HP and Dell have most of it done in Asia. Even Intel chips generally pass through Asia for assembly and testing, and their modern CPU tiles are likely to include TSMC-fabricated components.
All this is to say: the US is not tech independent (unless ancient tech counts). No single country is.
Though if you're just trying to say that the EU is significantly more tech-dependent than the US then I agree of course.
I, too, once believed this. Then I had the displeasure of watching a $10,000 server fail during Christmas travel (about 20 years ago now). A single RAID drive failed. Then, during the rebuild, a second drive failed. Then the RAID controller itself failed catastrophically, losing all the RAID volume metadata. When we restored from backup, we discovered that the sysadmin who had just quit a few weeks before had lied to us about the backup system, and we had no backups.
This is the sort of black swan event that happens every 5-10 years. It's an unusually bad event, even by black swan standards, but stuff like this happens.
The fundamental problem of self-hosted databases is that you test the happy path every day, but you only test true disaster recovery every 5-10 years. And in practice, this means that disaster recovery will usually fail.
With a managed database service, most of what you're paying goes to making sure that disaster recovery works. And in my experience, it does. I've seen RDS database servers fail catastrophically, and completely rebuild in under 15 minutes with virtually no data loss, with almost no human intervention at all.
If you care about your customers' data, I think that a reputable managed database is the right move until roughly the point that you can pay for a full time database administrator. At that point, sure, roll your own. But do regular disaster recovery tests, lest you discover that a recently departed DBA has been lying to you.
I test my backup recovery several times a month by actually baking into our CI/CD workflow under certain conditions. The entire production database gets restored from backup every week.
You could use a managed db service as a live replica dedicated as a backup only. The queries would go to your local database on beefy hardware, while the replica would just have to be powerful enough to keep up with the WAL stream.
If bandwidth allows, you could even have local mirror in your office.
Does it do distributed inference? What kinda token speeds do you get?
If you're talking about self hosting in your garage, I wonder how you handle networking, I mean, even if you have a good optic fiber with 1 or 10gbps, if you start getting real significant traffic, wouldn't you end up getting emails from your provider asking you why you are using 10000x more bandwith than your neighbors, and eventually be cut off ?
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.
I am genuinely confused. Sounds like holding a gun from the wrong end and feeling protected by it.
If you use e-mail and password with a good password manager, that runs locally on your device and generate good random passwords, it is unlikely you will end up on haveibeenpwned, and even if one website does shit, the blast radius is only one account on one website.
Apparently it has not been working without me noticing it?
I don't even bother with a VPN, just occasionally push a 'sync' button on the roaming devices [when they return to LAN]. DB transactions [new credentials] averages ~0 per month... but there's plenty of capacity. Works extremely well.
How do you expect to access the passwords that the password manager manages?
> Moreover, password managers do not work if you use multiple devices for log in
I use a password manager with multiple devices, and it works. And yes, my passwords are "protected", that's the job of the password manager.
A classical password manager reads an encrypted database. In theory, you could upload your password database (usually just one file) anywhere, and wouldn't need to worry, assuming, that you chose a sufficiently long password for decryption, and assuming, that the encryption does not have weaknesses, which would allow an attacker to decrypt it without the password. In practice, of course you still wouldn't upload your password file to a public place, to reduce risks in the future. But anyway, the idea is, that only you know the master password for the encrypted database and so no one else can read your passwords.
I don't think it makes sense to even have a "primary email". I've completely separated work, shopping, banking, gaming etc mailboxes.
Also how do password managers not work? Bitwarden syncs instantly across devices just fine.
Before inevitable "what if your password manager is hacked...," what if your google account is hacked / banned?
(I'm saying this from the perspective of "regular people don't want to be inconvenienced like that, obviously you should use an external password manager for security)
> Before inevitable "what if your password manager is hacked
My passwords are encrypted with a security key. I think it is more likely for my computer to get compromised than for my password manager to leak the passwords.
Admittedly, if I lose all the security keys at the same time, I lose all of my passwords.
- Uses Google SSO to sign in everywhere
I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?) and I know how to use a password manager, but I easily understand how 90-99% of the population doesn't care enough and goes the low-friction route.
I work on auth for a European startup and this is the case.
What surprises me is that if they cannot do it, they will just leave. The post says it is a "conversion killer".
At its most simplified, this can be thought of as a simple function of time — the more time something requires, the higher chance something else happens during that time, invalidating the original task.
The best sign-in flow is none at all — that's what e.g. Discord does. They let you use the app immediately, with an automatically created provisional account. Amazing user experience.
This applies universally — convenience is everything.
Most if the "sign-in with google" accounts I have seen treat it as a shortcut to creating and logging in with an account with the primary email address of the Google account. So you can hit "reset password" and get a conventional password log-in to an account you previously made with the Google auth. If you get locked out of google, it's NBD.
Of course, this is probably not universally the case.
I like passkeys, but ideally it should always be an option to make a password, too.
Thanks for your insight. Outside of being a consumer, and as a security engineer one who appreciates things like passwordless, my experience comes from my employers passwordless rollout. The sentiment is broadly positive, but we would veer to a technical user base, and sentiment misses the nuance you brought up.
How is this low friction to manually copy/paste a code from email as opposed to allow a password manager to log me in automatically?! This kind of authentication is the stupid current trend I hate the most TBH.
Why specifically in-browser?
So sure, they might technically have a password manager installed, in that every major browser has a password manager included. But do they actually use it? That's what really matters.
I wonder if there will ever come a day where the average HN user actually understands how normal people use technology.
Just observe anyone in your social circle that does not "care" about technology and you'll see their reaction to a login prompt when trying, not rarely under time pressure, to access a service they haven't used for a while.
They will sigh, maybe roll their eyes. And who can blame them? The same goes for registering to a new service. Normal people don't use password managers, they don't have Bitwarden with auto-fill, nor do they ever "generate" passwords.
"Sign in with..." offers them a way out of a frustrating experience, it's the device telling them "Hey, would you just like to use this thing you're already logged into instead?" -- yes, obviously they would like that.
Well, I wouldn't say I don't understand it. If someone uses their smartphone as a hammer, regularly break it and regularly buy a new smartphone, I understand what they are doing. I just don't understand why they are doing it, I guess?
In this case, the post says that it's a conversion killer. So people are so damn lazy that if they can't click on "share the information with Google", they will just leave.
I'm talking about the fact that people choose to not use the service if there is no SSO.
Even absent the above. Imagine a signup flow. I can either click <Sign Up With Google> or I can go through a manual flow with input fields. The former is much faster than the latter. It surprises you people choose the path of least resistance?
What surprises me is that it is a "conversion killer". So if you ask people to create an account, it's sooooo very hard for them that they will just leave. And spend the next 30 minutes scrolling TikTok, I guess?
Before we added SSO, huge numbers of users would enter but never complete the signup flow. We assumed they were making the (baffling) choice to take time to go to an office and wait inline over filling out a web form. A year later, we added Google and Facebook login. Failures to finish signup dropped to almost zero (a lot of folks were still bailing out of the manual create-account form without finishing, but they were then falling back to Google/Facebook).
More surprising, that year the net number of signups (across web and brick and mortar) more than tripled.
People weren't choosing in-person over a filling out the create-account form. They were choosing to pay a fine instead of filling out the create-account form.
So ... I don't know about "less valuable than TikTok", but a lot of folks' decisionmaking sure is wild.
Each password is a PGP-encrypted file, encrypted to security keys. The files are backed up in different places, including my laptop and my phone. The password manager app runs offline, so it has no reason to suddenly fail, but even if it did, my passwords are just encrypted with PGP, so I will never be "locked out".
I find it very unlikely that it would get compromised: again it's encrypted to security keys. If my device is compromised, the attacker can extract the passwords that I decrypt while the attacker has control, but not the whole database.
To lose my passwords, I would need to simultaneously lose all the copies (on my devices, and on the cloud). To lose access to my passwords, I would need to simultaneously lose all security keys.
Doesn't feel like a single point of failure. Or do I misunderstand what you mean by that?
In fact a decent % of people stops shopping on your site if there's a few ms lag.
At every step a few percent of revenue is lost your competitor takes in.
While it's still true, I have read that the accepted lag today is higher than 10-15 years ago, because they have lower expectations due to a general decline in page load speed. (React pages with spinners/placeholders, newsletter popups, higher page weights etc.)
So no, I may not leave, but each tiny bit of friction increases the possibility of abandonment. From the perspective of conversion, abandonment is the same as "just leaving".
For a single personal user it's only a small bit of friction but if you're in charge of 30 people SSO is a godsend for boring compliance work and managing groups of people. You want to change a domain in the company not a big deal. Don't have to rotate passwords every quarter, need to restrict an employee from a service etc. You aren't imagining other challenges other than your own here.
The post says that if you don't have the SSO, it's a conversion killer. I.e. users just won't log in if they cannot do it with an SSO.
Of course companies use SSO because it gives them more control over the employees accounts. I understand why company do it.
Why wouldn't you choose the simplicity of "sign in with Google" if your work email is on Google Workspace, using the entire Google suite of business tools for everything (gmail, chat, meet, docs, drive, auth, etc) any everything you do at work is known to Google anyway?
Making an email/password account with your work Gmail is just extra steps, one more password to store, and perhaps the inconvenience of one more 2FA thing. Google gets the same information either way.
Similarly why wouldn't you choose the "sign in Microsoft" if your work is all in on the Microsoft suite of business tools (teams, office, onedrive, auth, etc.) and everything you do at work is known to Microsoft anyway?
For the same reason why companies implement SSO for employees? It's just easier to have one account with one password to rule them all.
And that is also why companies don't allow employees to use anything other than the SSO.
From the point of view of technical people it would be easier to achieve the same with password managers, but for the rest of us Google provides a smoother user experience.
1. Ease/laziness as others have mentioned. Even for a service that answers a real need, many users will bail out of the signup flow and just ... leave that need unsatisfied when they see a web form.
2. Underreported: google/apple sign-in buttons make it feel like you already have an account. The fact that the "grant access" new-signup request is a second screen and that "sign up" and "sign in" (with Google/Apple/Github/Facebook/etc.) are the same buttons to enter the funnel is huge. It's not that users are confused/forgetting whether they already have accounts (though some are); rather, it's psychological momentum created by the ambiguous language.
3. Trust and consistency. Nontechnical users just trust the recognizable brand buttons more. They don't necessarily know why/know how auth works, but they know that a lot of data breaches happen and are scared. The fact that the embed button almost always looks the same/familiar is massive. I suspect that it would also be a conversion killer if the "sign in with apple/google" buttons were styled to look totally different and not contain logos.
4. A lot of semi-technical folks don't like remembering passwords (and password managers--even good device-integrated ones--aren't as reliable at autofilling as a lot of casual users would like). Others know that it's a bad idea to reuse passwords. As a result, people use the button that doesn't require them to pick a password they'd have to remember.
5. Impression of privacy. Some (especially older) nontechnical users have a significant aversion to typing in their personal info (name/address/CC number) into online forms, so they pick the option that doesn't require that.
6. Technical people who prefer SSO because it gives (on the SSO provider side) a list of every integrated account; better permissions control (for services that integrate with e.g. Google for more than just login); a marginal chance of a little less data being stored on a service's servers versus the regular make-an-account option; somewhat fewer opportunities for a service to screw up auth by building it themselves wrong. This demographic is small compared to less technical users.
That's all presented without comment. Some of those points are based on exploitative provider behavior, or user ignorance. I'm just explaining the decisionmaking factors, not defending them.
Add all those up, and you definitely get a conversion killer.
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.
It should be "Pronto a trovare il tuo ricambio?", not "Pronto a Trovare il Tuo Ricambio?".
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.
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)
While I support the spirit, it's important to acknowledge the reality of the current situation with the US (and the rest of the world). It has little to do with SaaS services and everything to do with energy and defense.
Europe imports more than half it's energy. The United States and Russia are both net exporters (Russia significantly so), China would be close to self-sufficient if not for their limited access to oil.
And while Trump may be ridiculous, he's not entirely wrong about Europe relying on the US for defense. Current estimates are that Europe needs to spent around one trillion dollars on defense to replace American support [0], and even then faces large challenges in getting their defense up to standards fast enough. Meanwhile the Ukraine war has allowed Russia to completely rework their economy into a military one.
While the popular narrative is that Trump is the sole cause of this souring relationship the reality is that geopolitics have been shifting a lot in recent decades and Europe is simply not the global position they were 50 years ago.
Europe can rely entirely on European SaaS companies and will still face massive energy and defense dependency problems.
0. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europes-1-trillion-race-to-...
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.
But really, I wonder why it's not used more ? Price are maybe a bit high for some things ?
With Hetzner now for several years without incident.
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.
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/
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-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...
and this on how to get an email when you need to unlock it via SSH
https://dominik.wombacher.cc/posts/email_notification_to_unl...
* 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 !
Also aren't their data centres all in the Paris area? Do they have any geo-redundancy?
Putting closed source code on github is basically asking them to launder it through LLMs
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/gith...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgejo
Also see: https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/
EDIT: HN discussion on the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471
I just hope this is economically damaging enough that they will quit doing campaign finance for a party consisting entirely of despotic grifters.
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.
> 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.
Delivery Hero is really big and EU but too fragmented. Maybe Wise should add social login, I think Paypal has it.
Of course if you're the next YC B2B SaaS raising big series then sure go burn your VC cash on Google Ads, but that's clearly not what OP is doing, or really most of us.
None of my businesses use a "sign in with..." option and I highly doubt it would increase conversions, however the article and many commenters here are adament (based on their experience) that it is integral.
I'm not sure it's day trading per se, I think it's just a lot more relevant to some industries/products than others.
All other points are "mere" technical gaps.
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.
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
It is not a super fancy website, and the company is pretty old, but I don't really need a lot from my DNS provider anyways.
To assist others:
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.
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?
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.
We definitely need a vendor independent ID system.
- 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
(I am using their official Python client library.)
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.
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
We can see from this discussion that a small number of Americans moved to European services.
Does anybody know whether there are any European alternatives for Github that allow you to host private/commercial repositories without using self-hosting?
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.
> 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!
I wil never say anything nice about Hetzner ever again lol
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.
Disclaimer: I am a Tech Lead on Mailgun
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.
AWS SES does not work for me at all, the sending success rate is really bad.
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.
I flagged his submission for being AI.
Just as a FYI: if self-hosting ever turns out to be too much work, it's also available Hosted.
And then they cry when they lose access to everything because their Google/Apple account got blocked for some obscure violation of ToS.
Hosting and storage: Hetzner and Netcup
Domain: ClouDNS with Failover
Transactional email: Lettermint
CDN: Bunny
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.
Bummer they failed so hard at your deletion request.
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.
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.
Mobile apps, can you try those alt stores?
[0]: https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/02/19/made-in-europe-...
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?
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)
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.
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?
If that's the case, why do we have to suffer through an AI-generated article? Just give us the prompt.
This topic interests me but I stopped reading as soon as I noticed the slop. I'd much rather read a couple of human-written paragraphs with your personal experience.
What the author describe is just a supplier switch still owning next to nothing.
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.
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.
EDIT: Looks like it's an American one in the end, oh well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085756
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.
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...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Everything you wrote about the open market system is true, except it seems like that system have died over the past year. Europeans understand now that the US isn't a friend.
For example almost all digital marketing agencies are almost pure resellers of big tech products: ads on Facebook, Google or Microsoft networks. Similarly majority backend solutions are delivered over 3 big cloud providers' specialized products like AWS Lambda or GCP BigQuery. The definition of Mobile Software developer is someone who writes software for Google or Apple platforms. The entire fields will disappear overnight.
What's even the entry point? Google and Apple make the devices that everyone uses. Even if you build a service like you suggested, how do you ensure that everyone is using it?
As in, that they won't run away when they see them or that they will all happily use them? If you mean the latter, then it's just false. Also, why do you assume that such product would need to be used worldwide all of a sudden? Having something for the local market would be sufficient to call it a success in this instance. There's an ICC judge who could tell you a thing or two about having a whole digital life on the hook of services from one country, so reducing this dependency is a clear benefit.
Because I'm talking about not running on any American services. Which Americans can do and do all the time. I don't see how we can reach a point where we can one day not include google/apple sign in and not lose a massive number of potential users. Sure it's possible that one day we'll see a "Sign in with EU login" but below it they're always be sign in with google/apple, for a very long time.
I could say that you cannot run entirely on US technology, because electronics comes from China. Does that mean that we should just strive to move everything to China, so that we only depend on them?
Makes no sense to me.
"Sign in with LINE" in Japan? Quintillions of Yen were spent.
Also what about AI? Can't solve that with a sub billion euros of investment.
> 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
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-europe-doesnt-have-a-te...
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".
> 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.