alt Hacker NewsI moved my digital stack to Europe
Comments
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?
> 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.
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.
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
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...
If you're looking for a Twillio and Elevenlabs replacement, I am working on that too: https://github.com/codingjoe/VoIP
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.
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.
Scaleway has introduced Edge services recently: https://www.scaleway.com/en/edge-services/
No ddos protection yet.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
See also the Finnish alternative https://upcloud.com/ I also switched from DigitalOcean and have found UpCloud very good for my purposes.
TrainingPeaks -> Tredict I do not miss anything. Opposite is the case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> This website has been temporarily rate limited
Did he move also the CDN stack? :)
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.
Ugh gitlab instead of forgejo - no credibility.
Also... yeah put all your passwords on the cloud. Sounds like a good idea.
I own the domain govern.eu
I didn‘t yet have a good idea on how to utilize it, open to ideas.
Doing the same! The US is rapidly getting worse and worse
China has a lot more infrastructure than the EU.
Why not move there?
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
Did he drive home in a BYD EV after that?
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.
> 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.
That feeling having total control of your data
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.
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.
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.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
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.
> 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.
I try to avoid Chinese, Russian and American corporations as much as i could