alt Hacker NewsI tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
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Thank you for this. I'm in Europe with an established SaaS that's been running in production for years and I've converged on a similar stack (OVHCloud instead of Hetzner). However, I've realized you can stay sovereign and independent in any jurisdiction (not just Europe) just by simplifying your stack and running a few baremetal servers in-house.
Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house with power supply backup and networking redundancy and you're good to go to serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers. You don't need VMs: a single Mac Studio gets you 2–4x the power of m7i.2xlarge on AWS, and pays for itself within a few months of AWS bills. You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs (an unofficial Apple partner). You get free S3-compatible object storage with zero ongoing storage costs with MinIO (yes it's redundant even if you lose a server, and your hosting provider can't hold your data hostage by charging for egress). Postgres runs like a beast and is incredibly easy to setup - you get zero latency DB because it runs on the same machine, has access to lots of RAM and you're not paying per-GB or per-core. Managed databases are a scam. You don't need an Auth provider, just do passkeys yourself. And the great thing about Apple Silicon hardware is that it is amazingly quiet, reliable, and efficient - you can do thing like run headless browsers 3x faster and cheaper than on standard server hardware because of the unified memory and GPU acceleration, so you're not paying for CI/CD compute by-the-minute or headless browsers either.
This entire stack could give you computing power equivalent to a 25k euro/month AWS bill for the cost of electricity (same electricity cost as running a few fridges 24/7) plus about 50k euros one-time to set it up (about 4 Mac Studios). And yes, it's redundant, scalable, and even faster (in terms of per-request latency) than standard AWS/GCP cloud bloat. Not only is it cheaper and you own everything, but your app will work faster because all services are local (DB, Redis cache, SSD, etc.) without any VM overhead, shared cores, or noisy neighbours.
> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer.
I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.
Good, honest write up! As users we need to make more efforts to move out of the American ecosystems. Cloudflare is just so convenient to take only one example.
OT, about the finished product (hank.parts): the French translation and tone is a little rude. For one, it uses "tu" instead of "vous", which does have become customary on Social networks but is still a little bit agressive on a regular website. And "bagnole" or "balance une photo" is more than casual.
Maybe the target are young people but I wouldn't bet on it. Average car ownership in Europe is 53, and 55 in France. Share of new vehicle registrations by adults aged 18-34 is below 10% in Europe.
My two cents.
I’ve found Scaleway really good, I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more often here.
If it matters, I didn’t go to them because they were specifically an EU org either - when Packet became Equinix Metal and then that got shut down, SCW were the most equivalent in terms of cost / hardware specifications and I often used them in parallel when Packet was still around so as to not have all my eggs in one basket.
Super timely - thank you! Im in the process of moving the entire stack of my SaaS* fully in EU as well. Hetzner bare-metal, Talos k8s, OVH Object Storage for backups, self-hosted (for now) image repo. For now im still on Cloudflare for CDN, but bunny looks interesting. Using GitOps (FluxCD) as deployment strategy enables no dependencies on e.g. GitHub Actions.
For one thing running on bare-metal @ Hetzner is insane value for money versus GCP GKE. Im a third of the running costs and get ~50x resources.
The only aspect im struggling with is full-disk encryption. Although customer data is still encrypred with envelope encryption in the database, i want to migrate to fully encrypted disks (LUKS + TPM) sooner rather than later. If anyone has any resources and/or experience with this, please let know :)
* Gatana AI MCP gateway: https://www.gatana.ai/
I’m trying to do my part with Domain Chief. Becoming a registrar is pretty gnarly especially without very deep pockets (ICANN very expensive) but some great reseller companies (also Dutch) make it possible to enter the market.
I’m not perfect yet and tiny parts use Fly/Cloudflare (Anycast / Turnstile) and Stripe for payments but the core runs on own hardware in a Dutch datacenter provided by Dutch companies.
* Scaleway is totally painful/scary on data encryption at rest and in transit, does not feel like your infra/data is isolated from other customers
* OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help big companies going in, they are going somewhere on the SaaS
On most European cloud providers I feel like IAM is crap: workload identity is almost non-existent, API keys management is usually hellish. Same goes for encryption/isolation. I want to hear more technical feedback on most of them, devil is in the details !
Codeberg would make a better choice if we speak about EU source code forges. And Forgejo instead of Gitea, which is nowadays controversial project.
What do American colleagues think when they read about this trend among Europeans to abandon their platforms?
Currently migrating from Digital Ocean to Scaleway as well, found this article informative.
To assist others:
> Google Ads and Apple's Developer Program. If you want to acquire users and distribute a mobile app, you're paying the toll to Mountain View and Cupertino.
If you said Play Store, then sure, though at least distribution on there is free. But you said Google Ads, which you really do not need to acquire users. Returns on Google Ads were already low, and have only continued getting worse and worse. I'm sure someone here claims to be a magician at it and believes they can get a fantastic RoI out of it, and I'm sure some can. But the huge majority doesn't. It's very much like day trading stocks.
There's a huge number of other, better avenues for paid marketing if you want to do it.
Can confirm on Hetzner. I'm building a SaaS on it right now and had to request a VPS limit increase. I was so worried and carefully crafted my request message. I was bracing for a multi-day back-and-forth but they just... did it in like 10 minutes lol
> The pricing is almost absurdly good compared to AWS, and the performance is solid. If you've never spun up a Hetzner box, you're overpaying for cloud compute.
Yep!
Domain TLD is the one administratively completely entangled into USA system while playing a major role on the internet working as it does. ICANN should definitely be an international entity, like UNESCO.
All other points are "mere" technical gaps.
Its a really good sign that this worked out at all. And the takeaways are enlightening
- EU domain registrars might have some bullshit under the hood making the same TLDs more expensive. Might need to investigate - eu needs its own mobile app ecosystem, easy auth, and genAI offerings - - but interested to see why mistral wasnt feasible - other things need to be scaled up to have the community and maturity to function well. This come with time and adoption
Id love if this took off. If more and more people did this
Here in Norway (and probably Sweden, too) BankID is a widely used authentication system, and most domestic services will use that as a auth / login. Only "drawback" is that it requires 2FA, which is quite trivial today. But there are still tons of users that want their "login with FB / Google / etc.".
And a last but: If using such auth systems, one would have to account for all the different systems unique to countries.
Maybe some larger EU-specific ID / auth system would make sense?
I tried buying a domain on OVH and the experience was shitty was forwarded between different versions of the page GB etc and could not finish the checkout
Cool post, thanks. Though I would want to know how much cheaper Hetzner actually is compared to AWS?
We looked at StackIT at my company and they were twice as expensive... Which was a bit surprising to me.
I currently rent a full, dedicated AMD Ryzen 5 64GB ram server for €35 a month. Its amazing how much you can actually run on a dedicated machine
Would love to hear about the same but in Canada - As far as I know we don't have any Hetzner-like providers here.
The article does not mention payments. I would be especially interested in a European Stripe alternative - this is what I find really difficult to replace.
Happy to see Bugsink mentioned here as a solution for Error Tracking _and_ to not see it show up as one of the "harder parts" :-)
Just as a FYI: if self-hosting ever turns out to be too much work, it's also available Hosted.
We use bunny.net dns for Geo DNS with their dns based load balancing for my websocket infra. They have awesome community and support is top-notch. Getting a response from Cloudflare community is like taking a lottery if you are free plan.
Enjoyable article, thanks. I'd like to see a section on "layer 8" (or 9? whatever we are calling it). The regulatory layer. There seem to be so many uncertainties in Europe (and to a slightly lesser extent, the UK) now. I think if starting another company I'd have to give it some serious consideration.
If you dig one step beyond hetzner you should start to see that the whole thing is unavoidably global. There is no truly dominant monopoly holder anywhere. Who makes the photolithography machines? What about those weird Japanese companies that make chemicals and substrates that no one else can?
My European stack: - OVH for object storage, domain names and simple Wordpress websites - Scalingo/3DS Outscale for PaaS (looking for alternatives here!) - Mailjet used to be EU but they've been acquired by Mailgun - don't know if that's an issue. Brevo is okay as an email service provider but they could be way better.
It's also difficult to find providers for competetive large-scale non-transactional emails, i.e. marketing and newsletter mails.
None comes close to AWS, closest comes are messageflow (PL), elasticemail (PL), brevo (FR). Other players like Scaleway TEM (FR) and Lettermint (NL) don't offer non-transactional.
Did you use a European LLM to write this article? Or was it an American one in the end? :)
EDIT: Looks like it's an American one in the end, oh well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085756
Nice reading but what you built is impossible to use without registration. I'm not going to register if can't find what I'm looking for.
Authentik would fit very nicely there and eliminate that one large bit that the author says he can't avoid putting on US infra. I am only saying this because he's already self hosting a bunch of things.
My EU stack, works well and is cheap!
Hosting and storage: Hetzner and Netcup
Domain: ClouDNS with Failover
Transactional email: Lettermint
CDN: Bunny
Seems this page is not eu compliant anyway since there is no info who owns it
Thanks for the writeup.
Does anybody know whether there are any European alternatives for Github that allow you to host private/commercial repositories without using self-hosting?
AWS does have a European sovereign cloud now: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/opening-the-aws-european-so...
Now how bulletproof it is in practice will be tested in years to come, I'm sure. But it seems to be using the same model as AWS in China where a local company licenses and operates the software from AWS.
There are EU ad tech exists, wondering if one can leverage them?
Mobile apps, can you try those alt stores?
Inspiring! I'll likely pursue the same thing.
Surprisingly sober take. I enjoyed the honesty. Thanks!
For domains I am very happy with ClouDNS. Anycast DNS provider with failover functionality. It's from Bulgaria.
I wonder what author uses for payments.
Using self-hosted Mox for transactional emails.
Truth be told if you're a European business, U.S. cloud providers weren't a good deal for a long time. Not since the advent of NVMe's and cheap 100G NIC's, well, that's for sure. Let's have a look at AWS R8 class, which is their most recent native instance type with real, modern I/O. Now, these are ostensibly powered by AWS Nitro 6th-gen networking, which is a 600G NIC. However, if you fancy NVMe drives (R8gd) which you do normally, you won't be getting more than 50G full-duplex. If you want to hit 100G+, you will need R8gn instances which don't offer ANY storage. So if your idea of data engineering is not calling from the 90s, well, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place mate!
Good news is you can get PCIe 5.0 servers, I/O gear, and host it yourself for a mere fraction of semi-capable AWS bill.
Bad news it doesn't matter if you don't get enough uplink bandwidth, no control over the routing table in the core routing infrastructure leading up to your WAN, or actual routers capable of hardware-filtering 100 gigabits worth of line rate per link. And you will need all these things if you want to at least try and match what Cloudflare/Cloudfront is doing from routing standpoint. (It will be much harder though to match them from the CDN standpoint...) DDoS protection is overrated, but it's not for reasons people commonly think.
There is an ongoing lobbying push for "Made in EU" [0] which is unrelated to OPs article. The winds sure are blowing towards European sovereignty. Thanks, Trump!
[0]: https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/02/19/made-in-europe-...
I've built gethly.com entirely on my own VPSs, so i was concerned only with VPS providers. People actually might not know that Europe has orders of magnitude more developed IT infrastructure than USA, or China(Asia is actually quite a joke). For every one VPS provider in North America, Europe has 10. Not only that but there are all necessary services one might need - cdn, domains, dns, storage, payments... nothing is missing. I don't see why people think they "need" american companies, except the big three of cloud providers with their gazillion useless services. But 99% of projects don't really need cloud services at all.
All of those considerations are driven by politics, not technical matters. What if in Germany next election will be won by AfD, in France by Lepenists (Jordan Bardella is going for the win in 2027 election). And next US election will be won by Democrats. What's then? Moving back to the USA?
For anyone looking for non-US transactional email, I found https://mailpace.com via HN a while back and can recommend. Can't remember who the HN user behind it is, but they've done a great job.
I was kind of interested in the content, but I am so overloaded with AI slop by now, that reading this generated text gives me nausea.
I was looking to see why they landed on this stack, but there are no alternatives or evaluation criteria listed - given the generated article, I wonder how much of the infra was selected by an LLM.
Why is there no European alternative to Apple app store? It's rather strange to me.
> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple."
And then they cry when they lose access to everything because their Google/Apple account got blocked for some obscure violation of ToS.
I just signed up up Hetzner
Their menu has:
- Console
- konsoleH
- Robot
- DNS
When I click into Console I get an additional option called "Website"
I have no idea what Robot and konsoleH are.
Is it a prerequisite if you make a cloud platform to make your offering as confusing as possible?
Ehm sorry but no. Sovereignty means you own the stack not that you just choose other suppliers. Build on EU infra means owning a machine room with some servers, having fiber optic good enough for your traffic and that's is.
What the author describe is just a supplier switch still owning next to nothing.
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Great post, I did a similar switch mid last year.
Hetzner was something I already used, so I just doubled down. I have a single OVH instance where I ma playing with Openclaw, but that was because I was having issues with Hetzner that day on their new instance page (was fixed the next day)
I use Bunny for my CDN, I just wish they have the capabilityt to route IPv4 and IPv6 traffic to IPv6 only origins. If your origin doesn't have IPv4, it wont route IPv4 to an IPv6 origin. Something Cloudflare could do. Still a shame its not a high priority.
For Domains, I am still on porkbun, but i have like 20 domains, and moving them to EU registrars would be pricey. I will do it, just not looking forward to it. Also there are few registrars tht handle all the TLDs i have, nothing like Porkbun. I use dot.bs to optimize my registrars and keep track of them.
I self-host a lot, but I haven't done github. I have a Forgejo instance with working CI/CD, but there are some painpoints mirroring 100s of repos and updating PATs. Also I minimize how much critical infra I host. I do it as my day job. Don't want to do it so much at home, and I still do some between NAS and self-hosted services I do run.
I do plan to try out Hanko and Nebius, those sound good. and Hit up scaleway to see if there is stuff I want to use there. I know Scaleway can be pricey.