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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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?
European-based alternative to github : https://codeberg.org/
The hub for european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/
If anyone was annoyed by the site hijacking the mouse pointer, this rule works: "##:style(cursor: auto !important;)"
Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonym...
Did anyone else notice the leading image's caption? Chef's kiss.
> 100% accurate European digital infrastructure, AI generatedFirst 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)!
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).
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Might want to move your site to a server you own.... site is down due to "rate limits"
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.
Choosing between two tech-unfriendly regimes doesn't intrinsically strike me as appealing.
Scaleway has introduced Edge services recently: https://www.scaleway.com/en/edge-services/
No ddos protection yet.
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
Scaleway is great. Never had any problem. Has an open-source startup program. https://cartes.app proudly runs on Scaleway.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
Will the environment is EU be particularly better than US?
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.
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.
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.
From Rome to Babylon.
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.
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.
If you're looking for a Twillio and Elevenlabs replacement, I am working on that too: https://github.com/codingjoe/VoIP
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.
That's cool but your text-based web page won't even display in my browser which doesn't support webgl.
Great post! Today we just launched an European alternative to Claude Code - Berget Code- https://berget.ai/code
The art on this website is awesome. The Draad series especially
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!
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.
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 ?
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.
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.