I moved my digital stack to Europe
monokai.com
monokai.com
One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this.
Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount of migrations I've helped moving data from US to EU already is higher this calendar year than all the other years of my career.
Its not about public opinion, but rather data sovereignty requirements. Certain types of data must be processed within servers located in the EU, regardless of where the company's HQ is. That's why you see most SaaS platforms nowadays offer a EU-only version.
It has been a headache for our vendors.
It’s just that they started to execute now?
Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain...
EU Fairness dictates they all need to get a slice of the pie so this will be interesting (and by that I mean absurdly hilarious).
I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.
The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize.
I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country.
Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?
Cloud-In-A-Box anyone?
The "cloud" rose to prominence from a small period of tiem where Amazon had a lot of extra cloud capacity outside of Black Friday, etc, and linux networking issues that needed architecture to be a certain way.
Those linux networking issues have been long since solved, but the "cloud" was discovered to be incredibly profitable and sticky in the name of convenience and proliferated.
A lot of the "cloud" software is open source software that was packaged to have a web and api front end, and that service renamed to something specific to AWS, etc.
It has become so bad that we're considering moving to the cloud for our on-premise workloads. Only problem is some of the cloud providers in the areas we operate from have run out of compute.
Designing startups from the beginning to be able to be hosted in different places will become a norm.
Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.
Im sorry to say it, but i feel a lot of Europeans have lost a good deal of trust in the US.
It didn't come without a bit of pain, but glad I've done it - and to come with this I've ended up building a whole terraform setup for cross provider / cross region high availability within Europe.
So far my key mappings included:
- Cloudflare -> Bunny CDN (and honestly I am so impressed with Bunny so far)
- AWS (or similar) -> Hetzner + OVH; I'm also looking at Civo.com for UK presence.
- GitHub -> Forgejo. I do actually still operate in GitHub for development only work, however Forgejo is mirrored within my European private network, and thats where deployment workflows happen.
- Google Analytics -> Self hosted Umami.
I'll be doing a writeup fairly soon on the entire process.
At some point deciders at EU companies are going to notice that Hetzner and/or OVH are also not a bit but much cheaper than AWS.
Hadn't come across Civo. They advertise "transparent" pricing, but I can't seem to find prices for VMs... or anything else!
Maybe it's just me, but do you have a link to a pricing page perchance?
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_AT...
I would also say though, you have to be a bit careful about "they are discussing" because there are many people across different countries with different agendas, and a huge amount of discussion between people. Your link for example is a pretty good bit of background info, clearly saying VPNs aren't just about accessing porn
> In the corporate world, VPNs are essential for secure remote work, allowing employees to access company systems without compromising sensitive information. For individual users, VPNs prevent tracking by internet service providers, advertisers and potential cybercriminals. They are also used to access educational or entertainment content that may be restricted in certain countries, including authoritarian regimes, supporting freedom of information and digital inclusivity, as censorship becomes more difficult to enforce through VPN use.
It links off to sites discussing possible approaches to age verification which highlights that various approaches in France didn't meet the regulators requirements because of a lack of privacy.
I think this is a different kind of concern about how your products must work compared to worrying that with little to no notice your country may be cut off due to a diplomatic spat from some specific service.
I agree that there is a ton of bullshit as well though. Gotta dox myself with imprints for example, so I cant share my work with people without also doxing myself. Also as a hobbyist you pretty much need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore. Also gotta make sure that data of European citizens never leaves Europe and and and... Lots of things to remember.
And before anyone asks, yes I know an imprint usually is only required for businesses, but nowadays pretty much everything could have business intent.
I avoid doing any business in Germany these days. I tried to get a VPS from Hetzner but they demanded a copy of my ID and didn't accept that I blanked out my citizen number. Which is actually recommended by our national police for identify theft risk.
I moved to Scaleway instead. Much better company.
And this is a bad thing why exactly ?!?!?!
If you respect your users data and right to privacy then you've got nothing to hide by publishing an EU compliant privacy policy.
It might be "just a small app", but I and many other people still very much still "do give a damn" about what the hell you do with my data, where you store it, how long you store it and how I can exercise my GDPR rights.
I'm see a lot of "worse" in your comment and not seeing any "better". Can you give some examples of that?
EU: Slowly makes laws with consideration of how much power the largest companies have over consumers.
Surely you can tell the difference between these two things.
We don't have any "ideal" places anymore.
And we need to defend what we support and believe.
It's horrible everywhere. If you're in the EU go donate to: https://epicenter.works/ They're a citizen rights NGO working against all that BS in the EU (and in Austria, where they're from).
First the systems have to be up. Then we can deal with the spying and nonsense.
Utah, meanwhile, has an actual law in place that makes site owners (!) responsible for their users using VPNs: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/vpn/utah-becomes-first...
Oh FFS!
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law. Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous).
This is how our democracies work!
Implying government discussions will be approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
It’s people being paid off and it’s obvious.
Don't get too much up in your arms about it, any topic about Europe and EU on HN ends up with huge swaths of American commentators seemingly willfully misunderstanding or spreading FUD in these comment threads.
You'll get used to it eventually, so you can identify what's the real criticism and worthwhile discussions, vs the easy trolling attempts.
Just like with encryption, there will always be an idiot politician somewhere discussing banning it. Mr Google tells me, for example, that lawmakers in Michigan (US) recently proposed " Anticorruption of Public Morals Act" which contained VPN banning clauses.
Frankly, until such time as it actually NEARS, let alone BECOMES legislation, the only thing posts such as yours are doing is spreading FUD.
The clue is in the URL you post "thinktank". It not even EU parliament, let alone been through the parliament debates, let alone passed to votes, let alone passed to being implemented by member states .... its just a random idea someone wrote down.
And quite frankly, I would still much rather be in the EU's digital environment than that of the US.
It's a result from the "European Parliamentary Research Service", hosted on the official website of the European parliament. And it is fully inline with recent attempted and success legislation of the same parliament. I am not sure why you would call this a "random idea" and an established member of the Parliamentary Research Service as "someone".
Jokes aside, the long arm of the law takes some time, it took us long time go get Apple to even allow alternative app stores. Eventually they'll get fined and actually start following the spirit of the regulations, but it'll take time as they try to drag it out as much as they can.
It makes a lot more sense if you realize pretty much the sole motivation behind all this digital virtue signaling is "put my data somewhere Trump isn't."
Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"? There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
I think it's much less an expectation of sanity and more that the EU doesn't really host or do much of anything actually "important". The USA quite literally runs half the world so people are rightfully worried about it going "rogue".
Where did you try to find this? And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here? There are a bunch of contingencies already in place for economic instability both for individual members states and EU-wide, there is "Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union" in case there is one rogue member, and then each member state has a bunch of their own contingencies already too.
What exactly is missing here?
> There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
I think you might severely misunderstand how decisions are made in EU, and also how regulations and such are actually implemented. I don't think there is any such assumptions at all, that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.
Where are you even getting these misconceptions from?
Never mind the fact that incentives in Europe are not so different from the USA. It may look that way now, but often moving across the globe just means trading one villain for another.
Still a good idea, just a word of caution. If people make a move such as this based on some assumption about the stability of the European regulatory scheme you may want to examine that assumption with a little more rigor.
All Western governments have clearly decided to restrict individual rights to privacy, political advocacy, and free speech in general. The way this is happening simultaneously in so many countries seems a clear indication of a coordinated effort.
I also heavily disagree that incentives in EU are not different from the USA. The USA is an oligarchic government with pro-corporate politic parties. This is not the case in the EU. Not too mention workers in the EU often live better lives than workers in the USA.
Hard to not see how the incentives are completely unaligned. I mean FFS the USA made a very credible threat to invade Greenland, so credible that they were preparing for an invasion. An invasion started by your "ally."
However it seems odd to not follow your ending paragraph with more circumspection re the earlier ones.
If we stipulate that the USA is ending a trend of relative reliability and stability and as such constitutes more of a risk to Europe - including invasion of Greenland - why would we assume from this a stability in European regulatory regimes?
You don't think changes in the United States portend changes on the European continent? Do you imagine the USA descends into apocalypse while Europe remains unchanged? Will the incentives that push the American government to threaten "digital sovereignty" not loom in a Europe that has to increasingly face a more dangerous (given your own premises) world alone?
Yes, the current American administration is a disgrace. That is quite obvious and no achievement to point out, as you seem to well know. Don't let that automatically lead to the conclusion that Europe is some sanctuary. That does not logically follow. A relative improvement in conditions may end up being temporary. Caution is warranted. Especially from Americans who follow this "move my infra to Europe" trend without knowing Europe or its conditions with any intimacy.
As I said it's a good idea in principle. But some skepticism and caution is warranted.
Self-hosting (including object storage, backups, CDNs) is hard, but doable for some companies. For others it's life-and-death due to costs.
Analytics should be kept at a minimum and should always be self-hosted.
Email should die and be replaced with some E2EE solution. Matrix is far from perfect but if I were to make a website now, I would offer the choice of a Matrix address for account creation and comms. It's still federated and, while not offering 100% privacy, is much better than email, which offers none.
Using a service for transactional email is something that shouldn't be required in an ideal world. That it is only shows how email is captured by a few big players who simply won't deliver your message even if you follow the best practices when setting up your server.
Payment services shouldn't be required in an ideal world, either. They're needed because of a bunch of regulations and unnecessary complexities that could've been avoided and aren't needed from a technical POV.
AI use is troublesome when a company is not using their self-hosted models. As a customer, I wouldn't want my data being shared to a US company or an EU one, although if I had to choose, I'd say EU would be the lesser evil.
We need more playing fields and protocols new players can enter with being blocked by a gatekeeper.
One could argue Google and Microsoft are gatekeepes for email and in some sense they are. But at least it’s possible to challenge their power both technically and policy wise. Eventually it will fade.
Matomo charges 22 euros for 50k hits/month.[0] Basically, it's unusable for anything other than a hobby site - especially with the number of crawlers nowadays.
If you self host for free, you're missing basically all of the good parts of web analytics such as funnel analysis as they lock all of those features being paid subs.
In my case, my motivation was that I want to use LLMs to query the data with agents. This whole thing was surprisingly easy to setup and a positive thing is that you don't have a scary extra data controller doing shady things with the data.
https://github.com/th0th/poeticmetric
Looks interesting but haven't delved in it too much. I do like how I can create specific analytic tracking events without worrying too much about ad blockers but that's hardly unique to Umami.
There's also another interesting analytics open source project whose name I am forgetting. It was written in C or something and was efficient enough to allow free usage or self hosted, it was a simple hit counter I believe.
I think it's fair that GA is free and Google gets some benefits from using the data for their ad network.
The hub for european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/
But in case anyone from Codeberg reads this, IMO landing and signup pages need a lot of improvements:
> Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting (using Forgejo)
OK, so do I register for Codeberg or Forgejo? Do I need to click through to Forgejo (it's a hyperlink)? Do I care it's Forgejo?
"Software development, but free!" Free is the biggest selling point? Well GitHub is free too. WHY should I sign up?
Why is there no signup email address on the homepage like GitHub?
Why is the Register CTA off to the side, looking like a header instead of a button?
Why no screenshots of the Codeberg (Forgejo?) UI / wowing me with features? (None on the Forgejo homepage either)
Why is the signup behind that Anubis anime girl AND I need to enter a CAPTCHA after passing that?
> Confirm Password
That's extra friction and AIUI an outdated UI practice.
> We are planning to drop the captcha by improving moderation and spam detection. (state: March 2025).
OK...it's been over a year.
> Using Codeberg to spread SEO spam, malware, links to IPTV services ("tvbox") or pirated content will result in an immediate ban with no prior warning.
Too many words, pushing the "Register" button even further down. Just put it in the Terms of Service
Just copy these things from GitHub, it's not that hard. Right now it looks like a conference registration landing page or something
> OK, so do I register for Codeberg or Forgejo? [...] Do I care it's Forgejo?
If you don't know what Forgejo is or that you can't register for Forgejo, you probably aren't their target user.
> "Software development, but free!" Free is the biggest selling point?
If you don't get which meaning of free is used here, you definitely aren't their target user.
> Why no screenshots of the Codeberg (Forgejo?) UI / wowing me with features? (None on the Forgejo homepage either)
If you've never interacted with an existing Forgejo instance before (including theirs), you probably aren't their target user, again.
I guess the founded had trouble coping with the big attention it got and was swamped with submissions.
[..] > ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 586 IN SOA a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1778686176 1800 900 604800 900
[..]
Edit for those who don't get it: .com domains are fully dependent on the US.
Off topic: that’s a beautiful website
Our legislative trajectory includes mandatory encryption back doors, warrantless access to data, and data retention even when you think you have deleted your data from a provider. Our federal government is only slightly behind the pace of the USA and is cooperating and sharing with them.
https://ccla.org/privacy/coalition-to-mps-scrap-unprecedente...
Recent HN thread on this. (There have been several.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111531
If you're Canadian, write your MP. There are EFF and CCLA templates to help you do that.
Feels a bit ironic... though this website is hosted on Cloudflare Workers so using an American company anyway?
tried to disable it by turning off javascript and the page no longer loads - thus i am completely uninterested in reading this article
Couple of things.
The main reason to move my data to the EU is that I live in the EU and I don't want a few non-EU companies in an unstable political climate have control over it. It's too unpredictable and I rather support companies closer to my jurisdiction.
I know the EU isn't perfect. And my stack is not 100% EU at the moment. I'm a pragmatist and just got down and transitioned the bulk of my services. Always room for improvement.
Some good points: my domain is owned by the US. That's true, but no way around it I guess (I do own the .nl too though).
I should dive deeper into using something else than GitHub / GitLab. Indeed maybe Codeberg / Forgejo.
And Cloudflare proved not to be ideal today (thanks for the hug of death). I still think using Cloudflare is a problem data-wise, because it only handles public data, but I might look at BunnyCDN again to see if they have better limits.
> 100% accurate European digital infrastructure, AI generatedI am not. THe cancer of the Internet. Sometimes Cloudflare does not work abroad. It is annoying.
"Here’s the reasoning: Cloudflare sits in front of my public-facing websites. Its job is to cache, protect against DDoS attacks,"
If your host has no protection against DDoS then find a better host.
You can find very cheap CDN, if you really need them. Likely you dont.
As a word of caution, Cloudflare can have a devastating effect on SEO if you are not a paying customer and serve your stuff from your own URL. Cloudflare allows this only for paid accounts.
So If like it but it is a headache on high traffic sites. If anyone have an easy solution I would gladly accept it.
If you architect the underlying infra right it still works like a charm. But I admit people need to know what they are doing. I was quite impressed with both infra teams.
But as always, if you do not want tu use auto scaling US cloud based services, you need to enasure you have the right scaling and the necessary technical expertise at hand.
I am not sure how you scale Matomo we could not vertically scale anymore, we never did MySQL clusters because it just was not cost efficient for internal reasons.
https://www.scaleway.com/en/transactional-email-tem/
[EDIT] Found the answer from the OP:
> To be honest I implemented Lettermint before I migrated to Scaleway, so I didn't even look at TEM
Bunny, UpCloud/Scaleway, Proton, Mistral, self-hosted Gitlab, self-hosted Plausible, had no idea about BugSink so amazing, now I know... and I deploy everything via some form of self-hosted Heroku
As a business owner, I don't really care where the company is based on paper if the product is worse, the support is worse, or the ecosystem around it is tiny.
I want better European alternatives, but they need to win on product too.
"Not American" is a decent reason to try something. It is not enough of a reason to keep using it for years.
I have used many paid services from Europe and around but mailbox.org, imho, is one of the most user hostile.
I'd appreciate some suggestions. (FastMail is overkill for my usage. Otherwise it's fantastic, I've used its trial).
The Cloud Act is real and transcends any single company. This global erosion of trust highlights deeper concerns: specifically, that US practices have always been coercive. Now, the world is learning and taking action.
One note: for European payment coverage there is Rootline available. But I have to put up the disclaimer that I work at Rootline.
> Not everything moved. Cloudflare is a US company, I still use it, and I’m at peace with that.
which you admittedly couldn't read when you complained about it.
I understand why Europeans might want to go all in on their own tech stacks, but it might be more strategic to just not get locked in to specific providers. Maybe a mix of European, US, and Asian tech - with a good plan for easy migration.
No ddos protection yet.
The regulatory environment is different, so it’s worth understanding the ramifications as far as what’s expected of you if you’re operating in a different jurisdiction. It’s nothing that can’t be handled, but some may find they have to care about things they haven’t before
It’s a great exercise for shoring up independence from extractive providers
Maybe I should have AI write up an article too. Honestly, it’s not just rare, it quietly matters
Their free tier seems way too generous and I suppose this has to be adjusted at some point.
I wish it was motivated by pure patriotism (give our money to relatively local businesses), but it's motivated by uncertainty, something I wouldn't have expected from the USA in my younger years.
Cloudflare is a kinda funny choice to pick to trust, and maybe they'll re-evaluate that soon.
GitLab is overall nice, and I recommended their on-prem product a few years ago, at an AI hardware tech startup with unusual security requirements. Today, I'd still consider GitLab, but I'd first evaluate how Forgejo fits requirements.
Why are there exceptions for Anthropic, GitHub and GitLab?
> Anthropic is a US company...But it satisfies something else, the sense that the organization building the thing has given serious thought to what it’s building and why.
This reads like a weak excuse. Mistral and Mistral Vibe exists and even if you don't like them, there are many non-US harnesses (Qwen code) that are available.
> GitHub stays in the picture for one specific purpose: public-facing NPM packages and issue tracking for open source software.
First of all Codeberg exists.
Secondly, at this stage relying on NPM and the Java/Typescript ecosystem is quite frankly waiting for a disaster to happen.
This post isn't absolute on moving their digital stack to Europe as it has not one but three exceptions too many.
My only question is, what are the selling points that made you choose Lettermint over Scaleway TEM?
Using TEM seemed obvious at first sight, given the fact that you already use Scaleway for object storage and compute.
This changed when they were the first folks out there to get a dynamic interface in the browser (some of you may fondly or not so fondly remember the days of DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, and the like). Fast forward 10 or 15 years and now GMail is the standard by which everything else is measured.
I'm sure there are some things that are objectively better, but a surprising amount of preference comes from familiarity.
Just install your favorite desktop + mobile mail apps and you're fine.
If that can't be done with Protonmail, and you want to move your email out of the US, suggest FastMail, based in Australia.
Nothing really support IMAP search.
Every mua sucks at large mbox file.
-- Edit: I am a happy fastmail user
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
Then it is Go (Google), Java (Oracle, IBM, Red-Hat), .NET (Microsoft), Rust (Amazon, Microsoft, Google), Typescript (Microsoft), C and C++ (Red-Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Apple Google, ...), and so on.
I can't seen any reason for this to be "the biggest issue".
Use OpenTofu/Terraform! Much better than messing with cloud consoles, and then your infrastructure self-documents.
I’d also put out one note to any people outside the EU looking to switch to Mistral or really any service: just because they’re a European company doesn’t mean they’ll follow the GDPR if you don’t live there. Mistral is an example: in their privacy policy, they state that they follow whatever privacy laws exist in your country.
Well, that's kinda obvious - if they want to do business in a country, they have to follow the laws of that country. That doesn't in and of itself mean that they will apply weaker privacy protections if the local laws are less strict than GDPR...
"GMail lets you write filters against virtually anything"
GMail inexplicably doesn't let you filter against almost anything in the headers, except the few fields they hand-pick. Which is unfortunate because virtually every piece of political junk spam from one major US party has the same thing in its headers, and I can't filter on it. Presumably the other major US party has similar large vendors but I don't happen to get spam from them at this time.
And a serious lack of "dear customer, we are keeping all of your money for reasons we wont get into, screw you and your customers, you have no further questions." Which I consider a killer feature.
But given how often GitHub and AWS East 1 go down, this is good.
One bad day at Amazon shouldn’t stop Europeans from doing laundry.
The cloud should have been localized from the start.
You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their
plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.
There are definitely technical gaps though. eg bunny still uses one unified api key. CF I can lock to an IP and set granular permissions
given the article contents, this is a fair criticism
second, europe has the most digitally agressive roadmap in the democratic world right now. they plan to ban vpn, enforce agressive data laws that give full power to authorities and gov to extract legally your data from your "sovereign cloud", remove anonymity from the web, enforce a cashless distopia where they can track everything and block you from using your own cash, punish you with laws against hate speech where governements decide what they define as hate speech depending on who is in power.
finally for his choices. Mistral while riding the european sovereignity wave is in fact an american owned company with european founders and the french gov trying to kill anything that they dont like touching Mistral.
OVH while a good company is definitly not providing US cloud-level data resiliency and recent events are pretty worrisome from data loss fire and hacks on customer data
Proton, maybe the only company that ever looked for sovereignity is thinking about leaving switzerland due to these opressive laws.https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-would-...
also he kept the only company that is vibecoding in prod (cloudflare) and proud of it while laying off people based on the ai-religion.
It is like he made all the wrong choice if his goal was like he says to own his data and know "where is the data"
They had a datacenter burn down (in large part because it was fully built using wood) and lost all customer data and did not take any action for 6 months after the incident.
They're just not a serious company.
While the incident did happen, a lot of actions were taken and most of the data was recovered. OVH now also keeps backups even for clients that don't pay for it.
I was hit by that datacenter catastrophe and got my data back almost immediately, in a new VM.
I've been using them for years with little issue (no more than happened on my AWS or Azure accounts, I would say less because it's less of a mess in general).
Stop spreading false rumors.
All else equal, a more stable backup is of course better, but any backup is better than no backups, so choosing the cheapest possible option is often the best strategy since that's the one that you're the most likely to keep using long-term.
Huh! Interesting to see another one of these. I helped get GlitchTip off the ground awhile back. Might be worth evaluating as another self-hosted, drop-in Sentry replacement.
I know it was created in Ireland and didn't hear anything about it changing ?
For some reason the LLMs have started recommending us for people looking for a European or Swedish alternative.
(I work on ops for that product.)
"A > B" reads as "A greater than B"
"A -> B" reads as "A to B"
Also... yeah put all your passwords on the cloud. Sounds like a good idea.
> We are patriotic Americans. We have done everything we have done for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting U.S. national security... We believe in defeating our autocratic adversaries. We believe in defending America.
and
> So, you know, Anthropic actually has been the most lean forward of all the AI companies in working with the U.S. government and working with the U.S. military. We were the first company to, you know, put our models on the classified cloud.
> We were the first company to make custom models for national security purposes. We're deployed across the intelligence community and military for applications like cyber, you know, combat support operations, various things like this. And, you know, the reason we've done this is, you know, I-- I believe that we have to defend our country.
and
> And so we have said to the Department of War that we are okay with all use cases, basically 98% or 99% of the use cases they want to do, except for two that we're concerned about.
I have also rid myself of Google Analytics for a personal website. Replaced with a local solution that parses logs and builds reports that give me quite a bit of information. Its a more ethical type of analytics leaving no cookies behind and no trackers at all. All info is from the web server logs, you can grok quite a bit of insight from this alone.
Email is the biggest challenge, I have mapped out the entire migration steps for Google Workspace to Proton but have not yet pulled the trigger. The main thing is coordination with the rest of my family who use the domain for their email as well, they don't share my obsession with "digital sovereignty" so there is some negotiation around time tables :-) The Proton family plan will cut the bill in about half.
Password management --> KeepassXC with db on local nas. For personal use I feel you can't beat self hosted for password management.
Compute, Digital Ocean I continue to use and has servers in Toronto which works for me geographically. It's very low down my list of migration plans, they just work and they have treated me pretty good over the years.
Storage all self hosted (ownCloud and Openmediavault). Are they the best options, maybe not but they just work. No cloud based storage at all (Google/Apple etc etc). If I ever throw something out there it is gpg encrypted).
Offsite backups, two local copies to seperate drives (dejadup) on my NAS and offsite storage.
There are still some other services I need to consider. I do have Claude Pro. I run local LLM's for a lot of stuff with OpenwebUI but its not a full replacement.
CDN - Also use Cloudflare free tier. Have to give it more thought, it just works so well.
DNS is fully self hosted using dns-crypt-proxy / dnssec to Quad9 and Mullvad DNS. Works great. I actually blackhole any hits to google dns at the router, media and iot devices love to ignore your dns settings.
Github for code hosting. I know, Microsoft, but it works and is not a hill I am willing to die on just yet.
Photos self hosted with Immich on Proxmox. It's been pretty solid.
VPN, Wireguard to the home and have also integrated Tailscale for some things, which has been handy for extending connectivity and supporting my dad in a different city. Apparently they are based in Canada so that is a bonus. I use the free tier for now but am considering the paid version just to support them.
Router and wireless access points all on the latest Openwrt with consumer grade equipment, some of which I picked up used for like 20 bucks. Allows me to have home, guest, media and iot vlans for proper network segregation. Is it overkill? 10 years ago maybe but today I would not run any other way.
Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.
Did he move also the CDN stack? :)
I personally want a sane, stable and consumer-friendly market, no unicorns but strong consumer laws and enforcement against mispractice of businesses towards people and the environment. We are far from it but I think the EU is the closest to an entity acting like that and being predictable.
The US chases the dollars at all costs and China similar but depending on the party lines of the decade.
sounds basic but the problem for me is that the internet law in china is very restrictive.
on top of that, in the uk and in china, the government will lock you in a cage unless you give them the encryption keys.
so if i was using alibaba cloud, i would have to play hopscotch trying not to tread on various legal landmines and it's not so attractive for me.
So, fully KYC'ed with PoA no older than 6 months, strong residency requirement for at least two generations, half of the payments are rejected based on travel rule, SARs are generated automatically on every transactions and only EC card accepted?
As much as I'd love to move to EU services, a billing system being fully compliant to EU financial regulations should make it almost impossible to actually move money.
So... Digital sovereignty is cool and all, but Scaleway is taking "Know Your Customer" seriously.
I didn‘t yet have a good idea on how to utilize it, open to ideas.
Why not move there?
The sentiment we're seeing in this story/comments and thematically is EU's desire to distance from the US - sure in infrastructure - but more so in identity. Which on the high-level I think is a great goal (ie, Europe should have European identity) but is incredibly risky and I am not sure is well thought out, though I could be wrong.
We can say that since 1950s the US and Europe had a familial relationship with the US being a bit of the parent despite being younger. That manifested in everything from protection (US bases in Europe, NATO), money flow, and culture flow. Since the 1950s, America did not become more European but Europe became more American.
Today we're in the adolescent stage of this familial relationship - Europe wants to move out of the house and perhaps even pay for its own cell-phone plan and that could be wonderful because if that leads to a legitimately stronger and more robust Europe, that's great.
But there's risk. Sometimes when the adolescent moves out of the house, they blossom into the fully manifested version of themselves. Other times they fall in with a bad crowd or fail to deal with their internal problems - and whither. It's easy to tell daddy-US to fuck off, it's much harder to not slide into the clutches of Russia and China in the next decade or two, or to deal with the internal demographic crisis.
What worries me for Europe is that it is trying to "distance" more than its trying to "grow." I don't hear people talk about a Europe that's strong, that leads, that innovates - in other words, the motivation is still about the US (just in a negative sense) not about Europe itself and that's not a good sign.
I still don't sense a true vibe of resurgence coming out of my native continent. Difficult problems you've always had tend to come to a head once you actually move out of your parents house. And while it's great (or at least cute) that you can switch to a European e-mail provider that's very far from what it actually takes to survive and thrive as a country in the long run. Hope it pans out.
Especially considering that the US is the actual young country being swinged in instability.
The real problem here is that EU as an economic block is much less integrated than people think. Pensions? Not integrated. Health insurance? Partially integrated. Exit taxes? A complete mess. Languages? Try speaking English or German or French in Spain. Etc.
EU has demonstrated that you can have local identities (I feel more Neapolitan than "Italian", for instance) and one economic block. Unfortunately, the economic block integration is not as deep as you might expect.
God help us when the US finally decides that the vast amounts of money it pours down the drain to keep us as its vassal is not worth the squeeze. China and Russia will not be nearly as patient and kind.
America sends a VP to give a speech, which even though it made some politicians cry, was still just words. China will just use us for spare body parts and Russia will drop our people from planes.
America says it really would like Greenland, which it could take with literally zero contest if it wanted, and which it gave back to Europe after Europe had another one if it's many internal meat grinder wars. China and Russia just takes what it wants, they don't ask.
It's really going to suck balls being the punching bag of Russia and China.
Europe is by actual fact completely dysfunctional, constantly getting itself into shit left and right, constantly needing bailouts from America to keep it afloat, and Europeans pretend they are better than Americans. Totally absurd.
Sure now just think and give me the reason. All these moving to Europe post is getting tiring. Amazon follows the same EU rules, if not more, than Scaleway.
If you sell software and you tell your customers and prospects that everything runs in Europe, by European companies, this instills an enormous amount of trust. Risk averse sectors like manufacturing love this, and it will help you gain customers immediately.
So no, these posts are not tiring to many of us. In fact, we are only at the beginning of the beginning because many of us will be making these migrations. I wish things had run a different course.
more mean the US rules that hoover up all the data for the government