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willy__on Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

How do you tell? I am genuinely curious. I myself find it incredibly rude that people will accuse you of "slop" the moment you basically write anything.

willy__on Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

thank you for the kind words.

willy__on Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

That's why I ended up writing the article. I had some comments under my last post in the "worlds collide" category that I personally could not fathom.

willy__on Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

You hit the nail on the head.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Well.. it's the flip side of those social logins being known and proven conversion boosters. If you actively decide against them, you are losing a low effort tool to boost your CR.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Wow, gotta check out INWX. I am paying in the 50s now..so double the cost..No VAT at porkbun!

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Thank you!

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Hetzner is juggling quite a bit of legacy systems (konesoleH, Robot) around at the same time.. bare metal (root) is still on Robot, a system from the early 2000s I believe.. konsoleH is for classic website hosting and console is what oyu need for cloud. They are progressively moving over stuff to console now, DNS and Storage Boxes have recently moved.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Interesting! I will think about the Spotify thing. I will pass on your bank account for now, thank you.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Google Ads does "kind of" work in the niche I am in, usually with low competition key words.... but I did stop throwing money at it. I am never going to return the investment per conversion... but if you want a search engine to throw your money at.. it is still pretty much without alternative to me.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I am simply not at that phase yet... I considered revolut pay (UK) or adyen (NL)?

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

are you aware of https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s ? I am using it and I can wholeheartedly recommend.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I do understand what you mean with bias.. some models where quite stubbornly ignoring things like "I want made in EU - not GDRP compliant - not one office or data center in the EU". I remember this being especially painful for TEM and market email providers. Usually they suck at finding the right pricing data at first try.. so I ended up throwing screenshots of pricing pages. Now that I am writing this up, in some instances manually comparing them would have been faster :D ... The bias might come from the huge amount of US dominance in training data and might not even be intentional. In some niches you don't have many options, that's what I tried leaning on in the article.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

paris, amsterdam, warsaw and I think they are launching or have launched recently in other places

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I am trying to be on top of the legal stuff. I did start EU first with GDPR compliance and expanding to the UK was kind of low effort. Comparatively little changes are required. I might expand on that in a future article.. all that legal stuff was quite a bit of effort but I got lucky with my lawyer choice and felt very supported from them at reasonable cost.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Hanko can be self hosted, if needed - it is one of the few products I chose actively to NOT self host. I am aware of Authentik and do like it.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

good catch, will fix.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I still have GLM/Qwen or Deepseek sometimes randomly adding Chinese characters to things... :)

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

People usually have either one or the other account already, because it came with their smartphone. It is friction less from their point of view.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I think Mailjet is now owned by Sinch and Sinch is swedish?

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Claude helped write the article. It is 2026. I proof read it though and yes, giving an LLM a list of specific criteria of what you are looking for in a product is actually a pretty good experience.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I found scaleway's IAM system pretty solid so far. Right balance between "gives you nightmares" (GCP) and "one key to rule them all" (Hetzner.. Bunny.. and so many others)

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Do you have a source for this? First time I am hearing about that one. The German hosting CEO circle is pretty intimate and I gathered that Martin Hetzner is still around.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Interesting. I actually had a human translator do the french translation because I didn't trust deepl/LLMs on certain languages. He was Belgian though. Thanks for the feedback, I will certainly consider it - I don't speak french myself.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I am still baffled.. compare a domain like .party or .parts between porkbun or your major US based providers and a EU based registrar of your choosing.... It's not pretty, at least it wasn't to me.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

It was a mix of stubbornness and curiosity how far you could push this experiment.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I asked myself the same thing, trustpilot is pretty rough on them and a lot of people tell you online to stay away from them. I also had very good support experience so far. Their shared TEM IP had some deliverability issues at times, but they seem to have cracked down on this recently. I am on dedicated IP now, so I can't really judge if there have been improvements.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Yeah, they sell you that with the devices. You would need to crack iOS/Android dominance first before you could realistically consider NOT assuming someone has at least one or the other account.

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

Yes, exactly! Marketing emails are a whole other story. I was planning on mailjet - thoughts?

willy__on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

I was roughly familiar with Github Action/Gitea Action compatibility and had a self hosted Gitea already... I found codeberg interesting though!