alt Hacker NewsI Moved My Digital Stack to Europe
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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.
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...
> 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.
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.
European-based alternative to github : https://codeberg.org/
The hub for european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/
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.
> 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?
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
If anyone was annoyed by the site hijacking the mouse pointer, this rule works: "##:style(cursor: auto !important;)"
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
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)!
Did anyone else notice the leading image's caption? Chef's kiss.
> 100% accurate European digital infrastructure, AI generatedProton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonym...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Meanwhile, all european companies, tech or not, big and small, are preparing to make all their business depends on Anthropic or OpenAI...
I try to avoid Chinese, Russian and American corporations as much as i could
Might want to move your site to a server you own.... site is down due to "rate limits"
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.
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
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
Choosing between two tech-unfriendly regimes doesn't intrinsically strike me as appealing.
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.
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.
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.
This was a good read. Did not feel like theory more like someone actually shipping the change.
Nice post. I really was expecting you replace Github/Gitlab with Codeberg.
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.
The art on this website is awesome. The Draad series especially
monokai as in monokai pro spectrum vs code theme? that's my goto
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.
Scaleway is great. Never had any problem. Has an open-source startup program. https://cartes.app proudly runs on Scaleway.
From Rome to Babylon.
> 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.
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 ;-)
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!
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.
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 ?
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?
Mirror: https://archive.is/LNYYU — Works for me after switching to reader mode
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.
Great post! Today we just launched an European alternative to Claude Code - Berget Code- https://berget.ai/code
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...
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
If anyone else is wondering why no content is visible on the page, it's because it requires JavaScript and a WebGL context.
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.