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How has your experience with Bunny been? I'm quite split on it.

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.

To be honest, it's been flawless but since I mostly use it for personal or self hosting, I haven't had or deal with your situation. I have had to contact support and they are very fast.

I also use it to hide and protect my hetzner server.

It works well. My only gripe is the ipv6 thing

it's a super cheap "CDN" that runs on Hetzner and random hosts or their colo, it's not as proper as the other ones.

for anything DMCA heavy maybe just buying dedicated servers or something instead could work?

We used to expose the dedicated servers directly (i.e. no CDN at all), and while that was fine latency-wise, the lack of DDoS protection was really the limiting factor. E.g. Hetzner will just blackhole your subnet if you get DDoSed.

It feels rather unviable nowadays to run a business without some CDN/DDoS protection service in front of your website.

yeah, but dealing with DDoS is easier in terms of DMCA unlike with CDNs because it's you hosting it, not the service provider (this is how Cloudflare avoids DMCA when you cache with them iirc)

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

they use datapacket/cdn77, no?

they run on a blend of everything depending on the region from my experience. Hetzner is one of the providers they use

From a practical standpoint, would you consider "Google Germany GmbH" to essentially be just a reference to Google, beholden to everything that matters to Alphabet headquartered in the United States?

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.

Like the author, we self-host our git repos at work with Gitea, and it's working very well and brings a rather large set of features you'd expect from a GH alternative.

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.

Same can be said for Forgejo but then it’s not VC backed

I'm using gitolite + cgit for local repositories. I tried Gitea for a while but didn't like the forced user/repo flat structure inherited from being a GitHub clone, and didn't need the additional features that Gitea/Forgejo provide.

For CDN, you can try CDN77, they have servers all around the world. No affil, just they are based in Europe (Prague) :)

Right now, I would only switch from Bunny if they allow IPv6-only origin servers and route IPv4 traffic to it.

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

Ah yeah I see CDN77 has no signup button and just says "Talk to sales" instead. That's not helpful to small self hosters.

Even for big corp.

When I see "talk to sales" I just move on. I don't have time to waste on that.

> 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.

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.

For domains i find Openprovider.eu is pretty cheap imo, especially if you have a lot and buy in a package it is nearly costprice. Their DNS isn't great though, good enough for personal projects but not for business, would set that somewhere else.

Hmm, seems the good prices is only if you subscribe to their subscription. 5 euro a month or 50 euro a year, then the prices get slashed. Othewise their prices are expensive.

Yes, comparing to Porkbun for .com and .net, it looks like you'd need at least around 10 domains before it became cost effective (the .org price there says it is time limited and I think does not reflect recent .org price increases).

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.

> There's also the matter that, ethically, openprovider seems to be heavily focusing on domain name speculators as clients

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.

> For domains i find Openprovider.eu is pretty cheap imo

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.

Agree! If you have a number of domains and can justify a membership, they Openprovider (NL) is a good option.

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.

> Some foreign extensions are quite expensive though.

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.

Why do you need to move from Porkbun though? I don't get it.

Porkbun is based in Portland, Oregon, USA. I'm trying to move my infra to EU only stuff.

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.

Right, I guess it only makes a difference if you use their DNS? Otherwise, registrar being in US vs EU makes zero difference in terms of speed/latency etc. Is this just an ethical or political thing that you want to be out of USA?

Mostly political, the other stuff makes more sense, domains are mostly a nice to have.

And for .com, .org, and .net those are owned by ICANN which is US controlled anyway.

gp, like OP, are moving away from USA based infrastructure.

you ca see this on the footer of porkbun.com:

> Made in the USA

How does dot.bs make money? The about page and FAQ don’t explain what they’re monetizing.

Why would it need to make money, it's just a registry of information and a small about page with a list of entries. It probably runs on sqlite on a single $5 VM. Or a single db.

Other than that, maybe ads

Because they also offer free DNS and email. There are no ads.

It looks like DNS is just shared CloudDNS, and email is limited. From the FAQ:

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.