I moved my digital stack to Europe

https://monokai.com/articles/how-i-moved-my-digital-stack-to-europe/

by monokai_nl • 2 months ago

1040 593 2 months ago

monokai.com

grodes• 2 months ago

From Rome to Babylon.

amai3• 2 months ago

More like from Rome to Athens.

dorianmariecom• 2 months ago

not the domain name :)

tmwoe• 2 months ago

A .com domain is not exclusive to the United States

dijit4• 2 months ago

Unfortunately, it is.

Unless you're implying that Verisign isn't a US company, just because .com has become the conventional domain for businesses worldwide doesn't change the fact that it's US-based. Similarly, the EU's widespread adoption of Microsoft Office doesn't make it any less American.

EDIT: That was unpopular. Why?

dangus2• 2 months ago

The OVHcloud control panel is a labyrinth: the lifecycle rule configuration is buried somewhere in the documentation, and it involves some work in the terminal.

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.

rob742• 2 months ago

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...

dangus2• 2 months ago

I don’t really feel like looking it up again but the verbiage sounded more to me like they were specifically trying to say that they weren’t setting the GDPR as a minimum standard.

We also have to realize that any privacy policy that is allowing for something out of vagueness is something where you have to assume the worst.

emj3• 2 months ago

Matomo is nice on low traffic, but when we have a sustained rate of 5-25 logins per second and above things become real slow. Using regexps is really bad when you start having problems, but they are fine on low traffic sites.

So If like it but it is a headache on high traffic sites. If anyone have an easy solution I would gladly accept it.

sdoering5• 2 months ago

I have worked with two clients. Both north of 8 million visits a month. Both on matomo. Both self hosted.

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.

emj3• 2 months ago

I had no problems either, until we hit peaks. We hit our problems at about 7 million unique logins per month, we do not track visits in the same way. I am not that invested in Matomo and it just costs time for me.

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.

toredash• 2 months ago

Managed a fairly large matomo site in the past. Using queue plugin (https://plugins.matomo.org/QueuedTracking) with Redis Cluster really improves the situation. We actually built a custom plugin with Nginx + Lua to avoid PHP altogether for the tracking part. Scaling ingestion then wasn't the problem, draining the queue was

emj3• 2 months ago

The tracking was not the issue the problem was report generation with segments. Every segment makes you regenerate all the reports. Tracking part is a problem because you need to split the tracking and report part of you want to have something robust.

spiderfarmer• 2 months ago

Use clickhouse

YetAnotherNick4• 2 months ago

Digital sovereignty sounds like a buzzword until you think

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.

bergheim• 2 months ago

Second paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

YetAnotherNick4• 2 months ago

Later in the article:

The act is not limited to companies based in the United States.

blitzar• 2 months ago

if not more

more mean the US rules that hoover up all the data for the government

kaon_23• 2 months ago

Matt Lakeman writes in one of his blogs that wherever he goes, people tend to love the USA. Except in Europe where he faces a constant storm of criticism. And that was before February. Just like you cannot explain the taste of chocolate to someone, it is hardly possible to explain the mental shift that happened everywhere when the US threatened the EU with military invasion. Like a broken egg this is diplomatic damage that cannot be repaired.

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.

YetAnotherNick4• 2 months ago

this instills an enormous amount of trust

So you are saying the reason that it is just perceived better?

Even that's quite debatable as I worked in few European companies and has never faced any backlash for choosing US vendor. Biggest European tech companies like Mistral and Klarna use many US vendors like AWS.

1234letshaveatw2• 2 months ago

Nah, they are tiring

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

Using OVH for backups is a crazy choice.

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.

sdoering5• 2 months ago

Any source for this? Would love to read up on this.

dijit4• 2 months ago

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...

Wooden floors contributed to the fire, they were fire resistant but that only lasts so long. Fire-doors are often the same type of wood.

riffraff• 2 months ago

this was 5 years ago. There were many threads on it on HN that may be of interest to you

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

hohithere• 2 months ago

This is in baguette but with many pictures: https://lafibre.info/ovh-datacenter/incendie-sur-un-site-ovh...

pcmoore• 2 months ago

I've been dabbling with OVH and it feels very pricey and fragile. Has a very lipstick on a pig approach to whatever they used to be doing before piling into cloud.

louiskottmann• 2 months ago

This is borderline adversarial propaganda.

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.

mystifyingpoi• 2 months ago

I was hit by the fire outage too, and the response was... mixed. I was able to start a new VPS in different region the same day and reconfigure everything, but data on the old instance has been lost. They also kept double-billing me for 3 months without me realizing, support had to step in to delete the instance that wasn't showing in admin panel, but kept generating costs. No refund suggested. I ignored it, since it was like $15 overcharge. Also months later the "deleted" instance reappeared and I had to kill it again. Strange stuff.

Aside of that exceptional case - overall they are pretty great and cheap.

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

most of the data was recovered

I had a VPS there and all the data was lost. I'd like to see any proof that data was recovered, because that's simply not true.

svetlins• 2 months ago

It's important to distinguish between a backup strategy and a backup location. A real backup strategy would involve multiple locations (3-2-1 etc)

gucci-on-fleek• 2 months ago

It's fine to have an unstable backup system, as long as any failures in your backups are uncorrelated with failures in your primary system. And a random datacentre burning down probably isn't correlated with anything else, unless you're foolish enough to host your primary and backup copies in the same building.

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.

__jonas• 2 months ago

That lettermint service looks interesting! I was recently looking for something in that price range that covers both transactional and broadcast emails but couldn't find anything in Europe so I settled on Postmark which has been good, this looks almost identical in features and pricing though.

sdoering5• 2 months ago

Same here. I just discovered this and put it in my "check out tonight" folder. I am currently happy using resend. But this looks interesting, especially also for my freelance clients with a focus on EU tech.

polack2• 2 months ago

Yes, Lettermint looks great if you need both transactional and marketing emails. But it's a bit weird that the OP selected Lettermint over Scaleway for just transactional emails when they use lots of other Scaleway services.

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

schnitzelstoat• 2 months ago

While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways. For example, they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection'[1]

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_AT...

kaon_23• 2 months ago

Of course. But then again, it was the US that threatened the EU with military invasion, so if you want your service to continue uninterrupted, it helps being prepared.

traceroute666• 2 months ago

they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection'

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.

AlecSchueler5• 2 months ago

Not only that but if you actually read the linked document it isn't calling for a VPN ban. It's a general report on what VPNs are and how they're perceived by various bodies. It does make reference to the UK Child Safety Commissioner's suggestion that they should be restricted to adult use only but it also talks about how essential they are for business etc. On the whole it's quite balanced and the existence of such a report seems very reasonable.

fp644• 2 months ago

its just a random idea someone wrote down.

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".

bayindirh3• 2 months ago

Currently, if you want the internet-climate of the 1990s or even 2010s, you need to build yours, preferably on a different planet, with your own hardware.

We don't have any "ideal" places anymore.

And we need to defend what we support and believe.

throw9304044949• 2 months ago

Have you been around at that time? NSA had recording boxes at ISP routing places, every few days guy would come to swap hdds. Most com was unencrypted. Or read about echolon...

everdrive• 2 months ago

This is exactly right. The new internet is analogous to cable television, but of course so much worse in many ways. The outrage and addiction are far worse, there are brand new privacy constraints, and of course it's controlled by powerful business interests with much more time and resources to pump into the problem than you have to fight it.

wolvoleo8• 2 months ago

Yeah I think we're going to need something like tor soon, but with more mass market appeal. The internet as we know it is dying.

UltraSane• 2 months ago

With the lack of encryption at that time I assume the NSA and similar agencies could read almost anything they wanted.

sevenzero9• 2 months ago

Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better. Lots of laws allow people to protect themselves from digital exploitation.

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.

auggierose• 2 months ago

Imprint is not needed everywhere in Europe. You need it in Germany, but you don't in the UK.

wolvoleo8• 2 months ago

I'd never heard of that imprint stuff but that's pretty Draconian yeah. If it will start being required for foreign sites I'll block all German IPs.

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.

traceroute666• 2 months ago

need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore

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.

9dev6• 2 months ago

Well, as a German consumer, I gotta say it's pretty darn great to be able to pinpoint a website to an actual business. It's a good way to judge how legitimate an online shop is before ordering, for example; and if anything goes wrong, I know there is someone I can hold accountable.

MetaWhirledPeas• 2 months ago

Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better.

I'm see a lot of "worse" in your comment and not seeing any "better". Can you give some examples of that?

cjs_ac• 2 months ago

The author isn't just moving their personal setup; they're also moving their business operations. It's not some slacktivism 'I don't like the US any more' issue; it's a 'how can I maintain my income now the US is firing all its glass cannon' issue.

xienze4• 2 months ago

Yeah except he made multiple exceptions and justified them with "OK well I guess these can stay because they're better than what's available in Europe." So it's not exactly "I have my values and I'm sticking with them no matter what."

IanCal• 2 months ago

I think that's a very different kind of concern, and its also been very predictable and slow.

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.

hankerapp• 2 months ago

Also, the "open your app store to competitors" was just bullshit, eyewash, cop out. The apps on these "alternative app stores" still need to jump through all the hoops, pay apple development fees, get approved etc.

embedding-shape32• 2 months ago

American company maliciously complying with the law, thinking they can get away with it? Never heard about such thing!

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.

dgellow2• 2 months ago

You do realize all those hops are what Apple decided to set up? It’s not from the regulations. They could have allowed 3rd party stores with zero restrictions but are instead trying to fake compliance

panzi• 2 months ago

So are certain states of the USA: https://www.ipvanish.com/blog/ban-vpns-us-privacy/

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).

wolvoleo8• 2 months ago

Utah has already implemented this. But yes this and Chatcontrol is very bad. The EU is not all good and we need to keep fighting such government overreach.

GJim5• 2 months ago

they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection

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.

embedding-shape32• 2 months ago

Implying government discussions will be approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.

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.

whywhywhywhy• 2 months ago

Why do you think entirely different countries and states with entirely different politics across Europe Canada and America all pushing the same policy coincidentally within the space of 6 months has anything to do with democracy.

It’s people being paid off and it’s obvious.

vrganj4• 2 months ago

While it's worrying this is being discussed, it's just that, a discussion, for now.

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...

xienze4• 2 months ago

While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways.

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").

embedding-shape32• 2 months ago

Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"?

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?

9dev6• 2 months ago

The political systems of the USA and the EU are extremely dissimilar. The US, by virtue of their "winner takes it all" mentality, is evidently pretty vulnerable to a mad leader single-handedly destroying decades of progress. Whereas the EU isn't a single entity, but a federation of 27 member states without central leadership. There is no "EU government", and thus no single corruptible entity that could turn "insane".

jdgoesmarching• 2 months ago

Virtue signaling apparently means making decisions based on the current reality instead of a future hypothetical.

tick_tock_tick3• 2 months ago

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".

vanschelven4• 2 months ago

If you/your company is already inside the EU, you can't really escape the EU's unpredictability, but you can to some extend reduce the blast radius of the American government's whims.

seydor• 2 months ago

The funny thing is that the EU will tout this move away from US clouds as one of their successes, even though they have done literally everything to cripple EU tech ecosystem.

contagiousflow• 2 months ago

US: Threatens own democracy, invades other nations, threatens sovereignty of long standing allies.

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.

bborud• 2 months ago

As someone pointed out: the risk is not so much spying but the chances of someone pulling the plug and your systems going dark.

First the systems have to be up. Then we can deal with the spying and nonsense.

aurareturn2• 2 months ago

Google Analytics --> Matomo

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.

[0]https://matomo.org/pricing/

basisword2• 2 months ago

i.e. you can't give stuff away for free if you aren't one of the 3 largest companies on the planet

aurareturn2• 2 months ago

Would you pay $20/month for Hacker News access?

I think it's fair that GA is free and Google gets some benefits from using the data for their ad network.

tjoff• 2 months ago

All the good parts of web analytics doesn't amount to much anyway. Especially if you desire to have a usable site, which includes no cookie popups.

c16• 2 months ago

Umami isn't half bad self hosted. Been using it with Docker Compose for a few years now on a LEB and it's working great.

shimman4• 2 months ago

It's not bad but it's a massive resource hog for what it purports to do. Shame that most of the self host analytics use things like typescript or php rather than more performant languages like Go. Speaking of which:

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.

jillesvangurp• 2 months ago

I actually decided to self host analytics and generated a simple drop in google analytics replacement. People overthink these things. It's a very straightforward analytics API. And if you ingest the data in a good database or metrics engine (I used Elasticsearch), you can query it quite easily.

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.

XCSme• 2 months ago

Or, to plug-in my own solution, you can self-host UXWizz[0], pay once, get all features and also receive support/help with setup/self-hosting and long-term maintenance.

[0] https://www.uxwizz.com/

dsumer• 2 months ago

Sorry for the self-promotion, just wanted to mention that I'm actively working on https://vemetric.com and will soon provide a self-hosted version as well. Maybe it's interesting for some of you :)

radicalbyte2• 2 months ago

Analytics should be self hosted. For any serious business there should never be a reason to use a SaaS product. For SME (including startups) obviously yes. But if you have devops teams then deploy on your own hardware.

Roark66• 2 months ago

Tell that to my Fortune 200 client that I've spent last 3 years migrating dozens of SaaS apps from AWS to GKE for.

urvader• 2 months ago

Great post! Today we just launched an European alternative to Claude Code - Berget Code- https://berget.ai/code

1over137• 2 months ago

And how should one mispronounce "Berget"? :)

m12k• 2 months ago

Headquartered in Stockholm, so "bear-yet" should get you fairly close.

shintoist• 2 months ago

150 euros a month to try it out is a bit rough, although I guess you're aiming for a different market than hobbyists

rvz• 2 months ago

Small print: With exceptions

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.

TrackerFF• 2 months ago

For the past days I've been participating(albeit over Teams) in a conference relevant to my industry (intel), basically startups and established companies showcasing their products to a closed audience of EU gov. officials.

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.

unixhero• 2 months ago

This is not a change. It has been asked since the advent of GDPR. So nearly 10 years.

radicalbyte2• 2 months ago

In some cases but not enough. Some of us has been doing a lot to help educate companies and business here and with the current administration - and the fact that they are being explicitly backed/funded by the Silicon Valley tech companies long resisted government overreach - have helped to finally open ears in boardrooms to the dangers of the Cloud Act and other leverage.

sisve5• 2 months ago

It started 10 years ago, but have def escalated the last year IMHO.

Im sorry to say it, but i feel a lot of Europeans have lost a good deal of trust in the US.

CalRobert• 2 months ago

GDPR gave us "oh cool AWS has eu-west-1 and pretends to comply so we can also pretend to comply" but I think the tone has shifted to actually caring, at least a little bit. And with the CLOUD act all the US based hyperscalars can't really offer compliant hosting.

pjc507• 2 months ago

GDPR is a bureaucratic annoyance. Trump is an existential threat.

jasoneckert• 2 months ago

Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).

hununu• 2 months ago

Being hosted in Canada is no longer the safety many assumed before. In reality it should not be an American company beholden to the current administration.

cryo322• 2 months ago

Seeing and hearing the same. When our giant private equity owners are even pushing us down the on-prem route.

I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.

AllanSavageDev3• 2 months ago

I spoke with some high level folks at a very profitable private company recently and inquired as to why they had DBAs on staff for what amounts to a pretty simple OLTP type system. Id naively assumed that someone of that scale would be using a cloud provider (RDS for AWS etc) thus negating the need for someone who really knows DB internals and upgrades and OS level 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?

j453• 2 months ago

On prem / self-hosted used to be the norm.

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.

eithed• 2 months ago

Loss of trust towards US is one factor; another is enshittification of services; yet another are good enough monopolies that EU don't have capital to disrupt

embedding-shape32• 2 months ago

I'm willing to wager a bet the former reason is the bigger reason. Many of the data migrations I've helped with, been to services that owners know are slightly worse or doesn't have one feature they ideally should have had, but because of the first reason, it's more important to move now than to wait for it to be perfect. I don't think many are migrating because of "enshittification of services", I haven't heard that as a reason myself at least.

codethief3• 2 months ago

Yup, I've been seeing the same development pretty much everywhere. It's become a standard question in procurement processes in all EU-based organizations I've worked for (I'm a consultant).

embedding-shape32• 2 months ago

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.

AllanSavageDev3• 2 months ago

EU hosting their own ops like they built the Airbus A380:

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).

2muchcoffeeman• 2 months ago

Surely there would have been mumblings in certain sectors of the EU since the first Trump administration?

It’s just that they started to execute now?

blululu• 2 months ago

Out of curiosity how much of this is a manifestation of the utility of LLMs? I get the current political impetus right now but also the barrier for swapping out an infra stack was also much higher 2 years ago. From my own projects major swaps are now relatively trivial which means that vendor lock in is weak.

weberer2• 2 months ago

I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before

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.

rcarr• 2 months ago

How many in your estimation are moving to EU owned vs just EU hosted?

anakaine• 2 months ago

In Australia we have legislated it on multiple places, and it has become tied to things like privacy legislation and for that which isnt privacy related we defer to industry best practice - which is often discussed and published by national agencies in the tech and security space, which of course turns into "must do" actions by every government CISO and CDO/CIO.

It has been a headache for our vendors.

j453• 2 months ago

Learning to self-host, or host on different platforms is critical.

Designing startups from the beginning to be able to be hosted in different places will become a norm.

MoaMoli• 2 months ago

i mean it makes so much sense, cause of the political instability. I recently was at a reception (because of the europe day) and there I talked to some officials that told me that even they don't really know how to to tackle the problems of nowadays. Basically every european state is trying to move its IT infrastructure from the US to Europe and i read somewhere in the news that Aldi is supposed to provide infrastructure to compete with AWS...

spockz2• 2 months ago

It is a subsidiary of Lidl: https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/140634/dutch-cen...

chasd004• 2 months ago

this is good, there's money to be saved in many many cases with self hosting. Cloud was supposed to save money but it's gotten so overdone that now companies have dedicated devops teams just like they use to have dedicated sysadmin teams. I think you can take the opensource paas's out there and selfhost something internal that covers 75-70% of your use case at a fraction of the cost of aws/gcp/azure.

flumpcakes• 2 months ago

The price of hardware (DELL, HP), and the price of enterprise software (VMWare, Nutanix, etc.) has increased an insane amount in the last 12 months. In our case some of the services it has been as much as 6x. Hardware quotes are rising 10-20% per week. Delivery dates are months out.

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.

alibarber• 2 months ago

(albeit over Teams)

Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.

vanschelven4• 2 months ago

The fact that these "move off US infra" posts now routinely hit #1 on HN is itself pretty telling. Another example is the public outcry here in the Netherlands over selling off the company doing the infra for an important citizen-facing piece of government software (DigiD)...

leokennis• 2 months ago

It's interesting the economic damage a few disgruntled WASP's in US swing states can do to the US economy by electing an orange toddler.

ffritz5• 2 months ago

I feel this and as a German company, we have our stuff hosted in the EU. But where it becomes pointless to have the host in the EU, is when Cloudflare is a requirement. Since we expose ourselfs through their certificate, we might as well host with a US company. And I’m not aware of a EU Cloudflare competitor with similar WAF offering.

happyspacebear• 2 months ago

Can you explain that a bit more?

mboehm• 2 months ago

I would try Myra. They are based in Munich.

geri42• 2 months ago

try Gcore as an EU alternative for Cloudflare

clickety_clack• 2 months ago

We were doing this in Canada at least 6 years ago, maybe even longer. If the servers are in a different country, your data is sitting on a machine that is subject to a foreign country’s laws and is accessible to their law enforcement.

Macha• 2 months ago

I’ve been working in a European SaaS for a few years and I’ve even noticed we get more queries about using specially EU providers. In the past AWS eu-west was sufficiently “In Europe” for clients that cared about that but there’s a growing minority that would like us not to use AWS at all. Not in large enough numbers that our company is planning a migration but it’s being discussed in a way it wasn’t in 2024.

data-ottawa• 2 months ago

Just a nitpick: 1Password is Canadian (still not European, but not us based, if that’s the issue). I do understand the choice to move all into proton though.

Off topic: that’s a beautiful website

james_pm• 2 months ago

1Password also lets you pick where your data lives - US, Canada or EU. https://support.1password.com/regions/

philipwhiuk2• 2 months ago

So do lots of providers. But the US law says if an American has access they can snoop as much as they like wherever the data physically is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

guilhermesfc2• 2 months ago

Canadian counts as reliable for me ;)

emptybits• 2 months ago

Canadian here. It pains me to say that my country will not keep your data safe from prying eyes, nor safe from sharing and cooperating with USA authorities.

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.

tamimio2• 2 months ago

Well thanks but it’s the worst of both worlds, neither the European regulations nor US laws, many bills passed recently where law enforcement can tap into any data, so I would not trust that either. Also, highly likely they use US infra like clouds/etc so back to square one.

tick_tock_tick3• 2 months ago

Canadian is basically the worst option possible they bend over backward to the USA and you don't even get the USA own internal protection. All the downsides of hosting in the USA without any benefits.

tjek• 2 months ago

Canada's Bill C-22 (the Lawful Access Act) would, if passed, allow the government to secretly order 1Password to build access capabilities for authorities and bar them from disclosing it.

frevib• 2 months ago

Scaleway has introduced Edge services recently: https://www.scaleway.com/en/edge-services/

No ddos protection yet.

wolvoleo8• 2 months ago

I've been very happy with scaleway for many years yes. I can recommend them. Much more professional than OVH and Hetzner too.

rc_kas• 2 months ago

I switched to Protonmail a month ago. It is patently inferior to gmail. Every day I get annoyed by some weakness in the UI that google had apparently just always solved without me ever having to think about it. For example, reading long email chains in the proton UI is horrific. I don't know what google did that made it natural to read and proton does so badly, but it is painful to read these long chains of emails. Another example is log emails from my servers are getting grouped together by Proton. Gmail had sepearated the logs into separate emails in a very natural way. These small annoyances add up and I'm not having a fun time right now with proton.

d4mi3n• 2 months ago

This is actually a pretty interesting observation as GMail, when it first came out, was just as clunky as all the other webmail clients. At the time, everyone was used to Yahoo!, MSN, etc. and Google was the odd one out with their webmail client.

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.

jorisw5• 2 months ago

I'll never understand why people insist on using web based email.

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.

j16sdiz• 2 months ago

Searching email in local mailbox is a constant problem for me.

Nothing really support IMAP search.

Every mua sucks at large mbox file.

-- Edit: I am a happy fastmail user

Oxodao• 2 months ago

It can be done with proton, or at least it used to be possible (Not sure, didn't check in a while) thanks to their bridge. A small local software you'd run that decrypt everything and provides a local imap server with the decrypted content

sisve5• 2 months ago

A pragmatic article, always nice. I was surprised that gitlab and github was stillton the list. For me moving to self hosted forgejo was one of the easiest transition i had. But i did not have complex CI/CD needs

swiftcoder2• 2 months ago

While I do think the link highlights are pretty neat, this particular cursor hijack annoys me greatly. Would be nicer to float the link highlights next to the standard cursor.

vovavili• 2 months ago

Choosing between two tech-unfriendly regimes doesn't intrinsically strike me as appealing.

fleebee• 2 months ago

If anyone else is wondering why no content is visible on the page, it's because it requires JavaScript and a WebGL context.

classified• 2 months ago

And also this:

  You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their
  plan limits.  Check back later once traffic has gone down.

Cloudflare is no fun. How much coal does the steam engine need to serve this site?

Erenay092• 2 months ago

so the author didnt fully move to an EU stack. still dependent on Cloudflare, the monopoly.

jorisw5• 2 months ago

Reader mode works

anaisbetts• 2 months ago

Proton Mail not supporting filters for message bodies is brutal, I understand why they don't do it but that really lowers its usability for me. Bummer.

Havoc• 2 months ago

Yeah trying to move more stuff out of the US too, while simultaneously trying to pick things that don’t follow the stupid unlimited scaling of how much money we can pull out of your wallet model. Two birds with one stone.

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

alaudet2• 2 months ago

I am not running a company, just a household but this article speaks to me. I have given this topic plenty of thought in the past year as I have a growing unease with large American tech firms and how they use data. These are some of my setups (in the spirit of the article)

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.

guilhermesfc2• 2 months ago

Everyone talks about Proton, but I've used Tuta.com for years (no vested interest) and it works fine

alaudet2• 2 months ago

Looks solid, I had never even heard of them.

fractalf• 2 months ago

Doing the same! The US is rapidly getting worse and worse

dbvn• 2 months ago

Might want to move your site to a server you own.... site is down due to "rate limits"

simon84• 2 months ago

Rate limit from Cloudflare, so much for moving to EU Stack :/

vanschelven4• 2 months ago

They say

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.

articsputnik• 2 months ago

This website has been temporarily rate limited

Did he move also the CDN stack? :)

jwpapi• 2 months ago

I own the domain govern.eu

I didn‘t yet have a good idea on how to utilize it, open to ideas.

IAmFledge4• 2 months ago

I started the process of this back in January and now, at least in terms of product hosting; fully migrated into European infrastructure (https://bannermedia.ltd).

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.

esistgut• 2 months ago

Waiting for your writeup, especially the Bunny part. We moved away from AWS but Cloudflare remains a point of failure, we are going to remove it as soon as we have some spare time to do the required research.

IAmFledge4• 2 months ago

Honestly my needs are not super complicated. There are a few edge rules I have in place to try and block things like the TikTok Bytespider which is hammering one of my sites. It's able to support round-robin multi-endpoint DNS, including weightings you can update which is super useful for what I'm doing. I've only really needed to speak to support twice so far; one was to get un-blocked because I migrated all my sites too quickly on a fresh account lol, so triggered their suspicious activity (so just be aware of that) - but both times they replied within an hour and resolved things.

MartijnHols• 2 months ago

What are you looking for? I use Bunny CDN along with Bunny Shield, and together they're better than Cloudflare for me. It's $10/month, but I can afford it for the privacy of my users. Bunny's aggressive bot blocking without bothering the vast majority of users with regular challenge pages provides a much better UX.

TacticalCoder2• 2 months ago

- AWS (or similar) -> Hetzner + OVH; I'm also looking at Civo.com for UK presence.

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.

zeafoamrun• 2 months ago

We already use them for our egress heavy services.

xandrius3• 2 months ago

Instead of Hetzner, I found UpCloud to be a great EU alternative. Reliable, cheap and supportive.

manueltgomes• 2 months ago

How's the Object Storage support? did you have any issues? Hetzner looks more stable now but I had a lot of issues with S3 compatible storage a while ago... Almost made me change everything. If you're willing or able to share of course..

GordonS2• 2 months ago

looking at Civo.com for UK presence

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?

zipy124• 2 months ago

In the menu there is the pricing page? URL is /pricing

ffritz5• 2 months ago

Did you use Cloudflare for it’s WAF too or just CDN? Last I checked Bunny is not a replacement for the CF WAF.

IAmFledge4• 2 months ago

They have Bunny Shield which I have in place as a first stage, but Bunny points to my own ingress boxes / load balancers which themselves are running ModSecurity, OWASP CRS and CrowdSec.

geri42• 2 months ago

try Gcore as well

actualwitch• 2 months ago

Solid list! To expand upon it, Let's Encrypt -> ZeroSSL.

jviotti• 2 months ago

If you want pure compute, https://unikraft.com has been great. We run schemas.sourcemeta.com on it, and it offers EU hosting (Frankfurt). They are themselves a German startup (though now with US presence too)

vipshek• 2 months ago

This website has been temporarily rate limited

Feels a bit ironic... though this website is hosted on Cloudflare Workers so using an American company anyway?

Winblows11• 2 months ago

Cloudflare = NSA creation to get around HTTPS

chrisweekly2• 2 months ago

citation?

iso1631• 2 months ago

I think it's more likely they just use/abuse it than specifically created it, same as things like google spyware. The NSA's desires and the ad industry are aligned, so its a match made in heaven.

monokai_nl4• 2 months ago

Well this is nice. Apparently I reached some limits (thanks all), and had to pay Cloudflare more. Fair I guess, although some warning would've been nice. Tried multiple payment options multiple times just now and Cloudflare botched every time without giving me an error message. Finally managed to get it through on the 10th time. Please be gentle now :/

embedding-shape32• 2 months ago

That sucks... Bunny CDN served me and others great when it comes to a Cloudflare alternative, if you're looking for an alternative.

I understand the pragmatism with going with CF, but I'd lie if I didn't also say using CF as the front for your entire "European Digital Stack" kind of makes the blog-post feel less authentic compared to my initial impression, because of that.

devsda• 2 months ago

I want point out the other aspect of that decision to use cloudflare because the content is already public.

If your users are in a sanctioned region or a sanctioned entity it is entirely possible for cloudflare to deny serving them traffic. In a way your website users are still bound to the US policies even if you or your country doesnt approve of those sanctions.

NietTim2• 2 months ago

Oh that's "funny". Where I work we used to pay for cloudflare, then the credit card expired and we didn't notice in time (our bad, for sure), now our account still works fine, just no premium features and all tickets we've made in order to _resume paying them_ have gone unanswered. Big shrug

sixhobbits• 2 months ago

fwiw I've had my site on front page hn a couple of times. It is a completely unoptimized hetzner server running nginx and serving HTML.

computers are _fast_ these days, you're more likely to have an outage from cloudflare than by just skipping it IMO (for basic personal sites, like yours seems to be)

ktm5j• 2 months ago

If ya read the article it lists cloudflare as one of the exceptions ;P

brendanml• 2 months ago

Yea I agree

pbiggar• 2 months ago

Disagree on his characterization of Claude as being much better than OpenAI (a very low bar), esp from a sovereignty perspective. Here's what Anthropic's CEO had to say (from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-full...):

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.

davedx• 2 months ago

Temporarily rate limited ... By CloudFlare?

rc_mob• 2 months ago

lol. true

given the article contents, this is a fair criticism

jorisw5• 2 months ago

Mirror: https://archive.is/LNYYU — Works for me after switching to reader mode

Mashimo• 2 months ago

Heh, ironic that the link is now "temporarily rate limited" my cloudflare. I can't read the article, but it looks like he did not move everything to europe ;-)

999900000999• 2 months ago

Can’t read the article…

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.

chakintosh• 2 months ago

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonym...

cipher-108• 2 months ago

See also the Finnish alternative https://upcloud.com/ I also switched from DigitalOcean and have found UpCloud very good for my purposes.

throwaway20376• 2 months ago

Did anyone else notice the leading image's caption? Chef's kiss.

    > 100% accurate European digital infrastructure, AI generated

codethief3• 2 months ago

Off-topic: Oof, I like the Monokai theme very much but that cursor on the author's website… not so much. It is terribly laggy.

yiiii• 2 months ago

Showed Cloudflare error page "Please check back later - Error 1027" for me for a while, DNS still pointing there... So probably not so European after all!

neonstatic• 2 months ago

They acknowledge it in the article.

maelito• 2 months ago

Scaleway is great. Never had any problem. Has an open-source startup program. https://cartes.app proudly runs on Scaleway.

severino• 2 months ago

Do you know if it's possible to cap expenses on Scaleway so you don't end up with unexpected charges (due to bandwidth or whatever)? I mean, having your services stopped until the next cycle begins or you decide to pay more. I knew this wasn't possible for Hetzner, for example, but I'm not sure about this one.

esher• 2 months ago

A sympathize, but my EU biz bets on US tech. We are in a tricky position now. So every 'Look ma I moved away from US big tech' post triggers me. Details: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/us-against-them

lenerdenator• 2 months ago

Did he drive home in a BYD EV after that?

amelius• 2 months ago

China has a lot more infrastructure than the EU.

Why not move there?

pjc507• 2 months ago

They're unfree and not great at service offerings for foreigners?

vga16• 2 months ago

Why not Russia or perhaps North Korea?

euroderf• 2 months ago

Stupid question... I guess SSG pages can be hosted for free from Github or Cloudflare. Any EU equivalents of these - with free or dirt-cheap hosting ?

titanomachy• 2 months ago

Not a stupid question at all. Hetzner's cheapest cloud server is €4/month, which includes 20TB of egress. Certainly not free, but should be cheap enough for most.

kenanfyi• 2 months ago

Every now and then I see similar posts and people move to Proton from Gmail, because it is European. Well, it’s fine if that‘s the only reason you switch, but if you switch because US became weird and lost your trust, you might want to check their CEO‘s comments on political issues.

Bengalilol• 2 months ago

While Andy Yen supports specific Trump-aligned initiatives for precise goals, such as breaking up Big Tech monopolies (which, btw, Trump won't), this does not mean he will replicate the erratic nature and global loss of trust associated with Trump and his administration.

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.

TacticalCoder2• 2 months ago

When AI is used to generate one picture, like in TFA, it's acceptable if the picture is nice enough. YMMV but although I'm usually not a fan of the AI-generated pics used to illustrate everything now, I dig the AI-generated picture in TFA.

codingjoe• 2 months ago

If you're looking for a Twillio and Elevenlabs replacement, I am working on that too: https://github.com/codingjoe/VoIP

rob742• 2 months ago

First time I heard about Mistral, so I went to the site. I first thought their logo is a pixel-art letter M. Then I read that their chatbot/agent is called "Le Chat"... wait a minute, that means something different in French? And then I noticed that the logo can also be seen as a cat head (from the whiskers up). Then I scrolled to the end of the page and saw my suspicion confirmed: https://cms.mistral.ai/assets/920e56ee-25c5-439d-bd31-fbdf5c... . Kudos to the designer(s)!

lefra• 2 months ago

A french with low exposure to english would pronounce "ChatGPT" with the first "t" silent, and it sounds exactly like "Cat, I farted" in french.

finegrainlabs• 2 months ago

One of my friends made fremforge.com (an EU-sovereign CI/CD with Git included). It's currently in closed beta but goes live next week (tm). It is built upon Forgejo and EU-based services using T-Cloud as the underlying hyperscaler. Have a look! I don't make any money from it, by the way. And yes, it will cost a little bit, but rest assured: because you are paying for it, you will not be the product.

w4der• 2 months ago

If anyone was annoyed by the site hijacking the mouse pointer, this rule works: "##:style(cursor: auto !important;)"

1234letshaveatw2• 2 months ago

thank you. What an annoying site

whalesalad• 2 months ago

there is a button in the footer to turn it off.

marcelox86• 2 months ago

there is also some janky, cheap feeling lenis-type of scrolling hijacking in place that gets disabled when the viewport is about the size of a phone.

tried to disable it by turning off javascript and the page no longer loads - thus i am completely uninterested in reading this article

mosburger2• 2 months ago

I wonder if the author considered moving payment processing to Adyen from Stripe? They're also EU-based and a bit more... well known? I liked integrating with them in the past.

monokai_nl4• 2 months ago

I'm considering Adyen and Mollie, but presently lacking the time to properly investigate and redo my payment flows. It will happen at some point.

mosburger2• 2 months ago

Checkout.com (UK) might be another worth checking. :) [I'm a "payments guy" for my day job].

bilekas2• 2 months ago

This is really cool, just for curiosity though is Stripe not considered EU anymore?

I know it was created in Ireland and didn't hear anything about it changing ?

s_dev• 2 months ago

Irish here, it was never EU or Irish. The Collisons are Irish but Stripe is an American company. The profits are ultimately repatriated to the United States.

bilekas2• 2 months ago

Ah I see, don't know where I got the impression they were setup in Ireland! Thanks for the info though.

flanked-evergl• 2 months ago

Never before in history has a vassal that is this dependent on its patron hated its patron so much.

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.

jorisw5• 2 months ago

The art on this website is awesome. The Draad series especially

FpUser4• 2 months ago

Depending on who is my software for I host either on my own premises or Hetzner / OVH. Do it for many years already and no cloudy headaches

huqedato• 2 months ago

I have several small SaaS apps running on Rended and Railway. I would like to host them in EU. Wondering if there are similar "managed" PaaS options here. I found none.

recroad• 2 months ago

All my customers are in US and Canada, so switching to EU will automatically add latency to everything. That's a deal breaker for me, so I end up hosting on DO TOR cloud. At least it's not hosted in US but it is by a US company.

pjmlp3• 2 months ago

The biggest issue, is that the whole stack keeps being dependent on external nations, as per the companies that actually contribute to FOSS with big money.

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.

kreco• 2 months ago

Using a programming language is not the same as using a service.

I can't seen any reason for this to be "the biggest issue".

pjmlp3• 2 months ago

Attack vectors and supply chain, every piece of the puzzle matters.

There is no accident that folks like Oxide go through the trouble to control the whole stack, hardware, software, programming language toolchains they are using, only working with vendors that provide them every single documentation and customisation points they need.

Unfortunely we lack an European Oxide.

pear012• 2 months ago

It is good to diversify but people should really not make Europe out to be some sanctuary. European governments (and thus companies) are still going to cooperate with America. When the day comes when they do not, America's reach will still be long.

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.

bradley13• 2 months ago

This. The privacy threats are somewhat different, but they still stem from government. The EU has tried to attack end-to-end encryption more than once, and they will try again. They are now requiring logging of IP addresses, and ever more tracking of use activities. The legislation requiring age verification is the camel's nose in the tent - expect them to require full ID soon. Etc.

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.

andix2• 2 months ago

Currently Europe is one of the last larger sanctuaries for democracy and freedom. Sad but true.

shimman4• 2 months ago

European sanctuary is good for Europeans. The USA is not a reliable partner and has uncaused a massive amount of global instability that impacts European lives.

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."

pear012• 2 months ago

That may all be true.

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.

raffael_de2• 2 months ago

For corporations this shift isn't about sanctuaries or ethical questions anyway, but about fear of running into EU road blocks placed for political reasons (maybe to penalize tariffs), long-term EU regulation enforcing data to stay in EU or even fear of retaliatory actions by US against EU economy.

dethos• 2 months ago

Nice and succinct article, and the choices seem reasonable and well thought out.

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.

monokai_nl4• 2 months ago

To be honest I implemented Lettermint before I migrated to Scaleway, so I didn't even look at TEM. At that point I was more than happy though. And I like to support my fellow Dutch startups too.

mark_l_watson• 2 months ago

I am in the US but my daily chat AI is Proton's Lumo+. Adequate, good features, not too expensive. I am near the end of a 1 month experiment using Google's $250/month Ultra AI plan and I wanted to try something different when the Ultra plan ends. I have tried Mistral's Vibe command line coding agent and considered it, but decided on a one month OpenCode + Deepseek v4 experiment.

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.

tedshark• 2 months ago

That feeling having total control of your data

sliqqq• 2 months ago

Meanwhile, we here in Europe move our stacks over to other continents or at least ourside of the EU to workaround the crazy EU regulation nonsense ;) We live in crazy times my friends...

Aldipower• 2 months ago

TrainingPeaks -> Tredict I do not miss anything. Opposite is the case.

yanis_t2• 2 months ago

Sorry to bring it to you folks, but this is not how you build a competitive industry. You put properly though-through legislation in place if you want EU to be competitive with US and China. Not regulations, for f sake.

xandrius3• 2 months ago

Honestly not everyone wants and needs a EU that can go head to head with the US and China. The markets there follow different philosophies: one is the wild west of free markets to the extreme and the other fully centralised.

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.

yanis_t2• 2 months ago

This is totally fine. Just don't expect that it will help the industry in EU. If we want to help, we need to push the politians.

lukewarm707• 2 months ago

china-based cloud providers would be perfect for me, many offer private sla, no data retention, and they have everything you could want.

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.

tinco• 2 months ago

Seems like not being compatible with Sentry's agent is a missed opportunity for Appsignal, which I think is the premier EU based (Amsterdam) APM suite at the moment. It sounds like Bugsink is rather barebones in comparison and I bet a quick agentic coding session would make short work of a migration to AppSignal.

po1nt• 2 months ago

I do use a lot of EU services. But help me understand what is the hype about moving to EU cloud services? Is it any different? Wasn't internet supposed to break the international borders and bring us together?

BaudouinVH• 2 months ago

European-based alternative to github : https://codeberg.org/

The hub for european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/

gib4443• 2 months ago

I'll preface this with a statement that as a European I want European alternatives to succeed, and MS-owned GitHub to shrivel and disappear.

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

shimman4• 2 months ago

This is a lot of whining over nothing... not everyone wants to copy big tech.

debugnik2• 2 months ago

Codeberg is not a commercial product, they've got a mission to provide a forge for active FOSS contributors, not to increase conversion rates. Reducing friction would be nice, that much is good feedback, but their target user is probably picking between them or self-hosting, so fixing half of these isn't urgent. As for the other half:

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.

sufficientsoup• 2 months ago

I don't think Codeberg wants to be a GitHub alternative. In particular, I don't think they want to support the use cases of someone hosting a bunch of private repos, or someone hosting commercialized code.

jlundberg3• 2 months ago

The problem with that hub is that it is not being updated.

I guess the founded had trouble coping with the big attention it got and was swamped with submissions.

debugnik2• 2 months ago

Not quite, Codeberg is for FOSS only. A full alternative to GitHub is self-hosting Forgejo until a good commercial deployment of it appears.

jmbwell• 2 months ago

I’ve also moved all mine to Europe. There are ample alternatives to us-based commercial cloud.

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

Brendinooo• 2 months ago

Bugsink

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.

ekjhgkejhgk• 2 months ago

Ugh gitlab instead of forgejo - no credibility.

Also... yeah put all your passwords on the cloud. Sounds like a good idea.

xyzelement• 2 months ago

Want to state up-front, I am a dual citizen: an EU member and the US, and I live in the US. So I hope this gives my view some credibility as being grounded in the dual perspective.

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.

quentindanjou• 2 months ago

Comparing Europe to a teenager wanting to move out of their parents' (US) house is incredibly condescending.

Especially considering that the US is the actual young country being swinged in instability.

kfk• 2 months ago

You might be right but you are missing a lot of nuance here. For instance, yes, Italy is not thinking about growth, true. But Poland? Poland is all about growth, they just made the list of the richest 20 countries in the world.

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.

pelagicAustral• 2 months ago

Got a similar stack for my personal stuff, but would probably do the same if I was freelancing and whatnot.

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

OhMeadhbh2• 2 months ago

I tried scaleway about 7 or 8 years ago and it was still pretty rough. And setting up with them required multiple trips to government portals to get id documents they would accept. Being European, they don't know how to scan the bar code on the back of US driver's licenses. It was a major PITA getting them to understand that people will sometimes change their names after they get married (my passport and birth certificate have different names and I had to dhl them a notarized copy of my name change order.)

So... Digital sovereignty is cool and all, but Scaleway is taking "Know Your Customer" seriously.

mwban• 2 months ago

Very nice to see this more and more. Recently the German province of Schleswig-Holstei also moved almost their complete stack to European alternatives.

One note: for European payment coverage there is Rootline available. But I have to put up the disclaimer that I work at Rootline.

chinathrow• 2 months ago

dig ns https://monokai.com

[..] > ;; 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.

andix2• 2 months ago

One of the reasons why a lot of important websites have multiple TLDs.

NietTim2• 2 months ago

Damn that is a very good point you make, thank you. I'm about to publish an app and had hosted the API on the .com domain, I'll flip that to the .nl domain

rconti• 2 months ago

Side rant:

"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.

neilv• 2 months ago

Nice and helpful article.

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.

achayala• 2 months ago

Nice post. I really was expecting you replace Github/Gitlab with Codeberg.

maryamshafaqat• 2 months ago

This was a good read. Did not feel like theory more like someone actually shipping the change.

ge96• 2 months ago

monokai as in monokai pro spectrum vs code theme? that's my goto

io84• 2 months ago

The very same - he writes about that elsewhere on the site.

levmiseri• 2 months ago

This might be too naively non-feature-parity, but in case someone is looking for a European alternative to Notion/Google Docs, we made https://kraa.io/about

rixed• 2 months ago

Meanwhile, all european companies, tech or not, big and small, are preparing to make all their business depends on Anthropic or OpenAI...

jeffrallen2• 2 months ago

European companies might prefer hosting open models on Exoscale's dedicated inference platform.

(I work on ops for that product.)

throw154• 2 months ago

I try to avoid Chinese, Russian and American corporations as much as i could

raffael_de2• 2 months ago

Is this trend going to boost adoption of K8s on IaaS as a standard for deploying compute over equivalent PaaS solutions?

65102• 2 months ago

When reading the docs of quite a few payment processors (for a simple cart check out) Mollie was quite hilarious. I kept thinking "this is it? This is all I need to do??" Then the masochist api's are also available.

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.

paol_taja• 2 months ago

I like the idea, but I always struggle with the practical side of this.

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.

holistio• 2 months ago

As a fellow European who's also working on a similar move, I would just like to note that it is absolutely surreal that we have to consider this.

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.

monokai_nl4• 2 months ago

Hey, thanks for reading and it's great to read your interesting discussions.

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.

tamimio2• 2 months ago

Since you are already in the migration process, should’ve migrated to self hosting instead, full independence and control, Europe isn’t that different from US, they just have few extra steps on how to handle your data. Self hosting is literally a weekend project once you have bought the equipment (or just use an old pc with hdds), and they are not expensive either, and you can even host stuff for your friends and family too. Maintenance is minimal as well, you can automate few cron jobs in proxmox and enable backups (plus 3 2 1 rule). Your data is in front of you, all yours, you don’t need permission to delete or access that, you don’t need to become a lawyer and read terms and laws, you don’t to call support for whatever either.

Worf• 2 months ago

While the EU currently offers more privacy than the US, the best solution would be to use services which no one could have any meaningful control over, as much as possible, except the user.

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.

jlundberg3• 2 months ago

I am so happy email is not dead.

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.

sajithdilshan• 2 months ago

I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get a loads of downvotes for this comments, but what is the whole point of this? Let's say in next general election in Germany, AfD would come into power, form a government and Germany decided to break away from EU, and when that destabilizes EU, are you going to move all your stuff back to US?

jlundberg3• 2 months ago

We see a lot of new users coming from Twilio.

For some reason the LLMs have started recommending us for people looking for a European or Swedish alternative.

Rover222• 2 months ago

So you love having to accept cookies. This is what the EU did to us. Unforgivable.

CamelCaseCondo• 2 months ago

If all the juicy content moves to the EU, the US will force the EU to open its platform for external access. See what happened to the Swiss banking.

crossroadsguy• 2 months ago

I had taken my email to mailbox.org many years ago and I have been paying the price (not the fee/cost) ever since. The service doesn't have zero support, it has negative support. If you ever face any issue the responses are such that knee-jerk reactions by toddlers would be no match. Sadly I've used their domain email at so many places that even winding it all down seems so tough and it will take long. I am going to do it anyway. Downgrade to single euro plan until I complete my @mailbox.org email change/migration while in parallel moving domains to another provider. I don't want quick email service support, but I don't want an "not our fault" after two weeks and then radio silence. Complete ghosting.

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).

sexylinux• 2 months ago

I made the very opposite experience with mailbox.org! Very competent people, very friendly, reliable. Absolutely no problems.

storus• 2 months ago

And in other news some European Google Mail accounts got a notification that due to their usage patterns, they are migrating their accounts to Texas (for people who might have traveled through Texas at some point in the past).

Beijinger• 2 months ago

"Not everything moved. Cloudflare is a US company, I still use it, and I’m at peace with that."

I 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.

wackget• 2 months ago

That's cool but your text-based web page won't even display in my browser which doesn't support webgl.

Fedot982• 2 months ago

big job

momo26• 2 months ago

Will the environment is EU be particularly better than US?

retinaros• 2 months ago

there is no digital sovereignty in european cloud. first they would bow down to any bigger instance of power that ask for their data and being smaller companies than azure aws gcp they wouldnt have the firepower to fight back against governments. Like this one : https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2025/11/27/canadian-dat...

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"

____mr____• 2 months ago

Its so silly to see people actually believe the EU is a real sovereign body. The only thing unifying various nationalists within the EU is Americas dominance in the global market and their opposition to it. An EU freed from American (and Chinese) political and market pressures will eventually lead to their various nationalists turning their anger towards whoever gets to sit on top of the EU (probably germany) and fracturing the union. The only other thing uniting "us" all is racism towards black and arab people.

mrklol• 2 months ago

I think I would move everything too for my hobby projects, if it wouldn’t be that crazy cheap at Cloudflare. I still use external servers in the EU for backend stuff, but CDN, static pages, frontend projects run at Cloudflare for free or the $5 tier. I legit can’t get cheaper than this, till they adjust their pricing.

Their free tier seems way too generous and I suppose this has to be adjusted at some point.

egorfine• 2 months ago

Mollie is a Dutch payment processor with full EU incorporation, strong GDPR compliance by design, and a product that has matured considerably in recent years.

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.

HackerThemAll• 2 months ago

I am heavily reliant on the Office suite, and aware of many business that also are. I tried to switch to LibreOffice numerous times, with no success. For example, a simple thing - the CSV import wizard is so inefficient and buggy in LibreOffice that I spent literally hours to make it work. I then proposed concrete improvements for the LibreOffice team, but they got downplayed and dismissed. "Everything's normal, just got used to it". The productivity with LibreOffice is ruined at the very moment you have to do anything but typing a text or spreadsheet cell content. Paying the MS subscription returns in a few hours saved by it compared to LibreOffice and clones.

spelufo• 2 months ago

Pedantic note on notation:

"A > B" reads as "A greater than B"

"A -> B" reads as "A to B"

amai3• 2 months ago

Instead of gitlab I can recommend https://codeberg.org/.

amai3• 2 months ago

I moved my digital stack to Europe

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