alt Hacker NewsI moved my digital stack to Europe
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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.
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
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
This was a good read. Did not feel like theory more like someone actually shipping the change.
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
Nice post. I really was expecting you replace Github/Gitlab with Codeberg.
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?
monokai as in monokai pro spectrum vs code theme? that's my goto
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, all european companies, tech or not, big and small, are preparing to make all their business depends on Anthropic or OpenAI...
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.
Is this trend going to boost adoption of K8s on IaaS as a standard for deploying compute over equivalent PaaS solutions?
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 ?
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.
I try to avoid Chinese, Russian and American corporations as much as i could
TrainingPeaks -> Tredict I do not miss anything. Opposite is the case.
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.
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.
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"
> This website has been temporarily rate limited
Did he move also the CDN stack? :)
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.
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.
big job
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).
I own the domain govern.eu
I didn‘t yet have a good idea on how to utilize it, open to ideas.
So you love having to accept cookies. This is what the EU did to us. Unforgivable.
Doing the same! The US is rapidly getting worse and worse
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.
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.
Ugh gitlab instead of forgejo - no credibility.
Also... yeah put all your passwords on the cloud. Sounds like a good idea.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
That feeling having total control of your data
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 ?