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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

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Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#181

Post by znnajdla »

swiftcoder wrote: post #146
znnajdla wrote: post #74

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 back…

What does your networking redundancy setup look like?

Got lucky that we have a good personal relationship with our small local ISP and I trust they handle that for us. In the future I want to make it redundant by getting a second gigabit fibre connection.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#182

Post by tecleandor »

willy__ wrote: post #167
LeonidasXIV wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porkbun has .party for $21.09 (bar the first year promotion, not sure about VAT) and INWX (DE, VAT included) has it 32.80€ . It is definitely more but not as scary as you made it sound.

Wow, gotta check out INWX. I am paying in the 50s now..so double the cost..No VAT at porkbun!

I'm on INWX but trying to get out, as pricing is quite expensive for regular TLDs. A .com domain goes for about €18 with taxes and all that stuff.

And the situation for autorenewal is terrible. At least when using their Spanish site (inwx.es) they cannot do autorenewal billed directly to your credit card or Paypal account, you have to previously add credit to your account "balance" and leave it hanging there until your next renewal.

Somebody mentioned openprovider.com and I'm taking a look because it looks interesting.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#183

Post by fsflover »

znnajdla wrote: post #179
petcat wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house I fail to see the point of this when the system you've to decided to run "yourself" is entirely owned and dependent on another American company.

I’m not anti American, that’s not the main point of my setup. The main point is I want to own it, not rent it. Apple doesn’t control my production setup after it’s in my hands. Macs from 10 years ago still work.

> Apple doesn’t control my production setup

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#184

Post by imp0cat »

deaux wrote: post #120
willy__ wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Ads does "kind of" work in the niche I am in, usually with low competition key words.... but I did stop throwing money at it. I am never going to return the investment per conversion... but if you want a search engine to throw your money at.. it is still pretty much without alternative to me.

If you want to throw your money into a pit, there's a lot of alternative pits available out there. Happy to share my bank account, then at least one of us gets use out of it. > You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. Every one of those auth flows hits American servers. The silver lining: Hanko, a German identity provider, handles the auth layer itself, so a…

There must be some alternative European social logins, I know Seznam (of mapy.cz/mapy.com fame) has one: https://vyvojari.seznam.cz/oauth/doc?lang=en

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#185

Post by pbronez »

znnajdla wrote: post #74

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 back…

Are you actually using Exo for local clustered AI inference? I’ve considered it a few times and keep finding horror stories. Never seen someone report it’s actually working well for them.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#186

Post by znnajdla »

aa-jv wrote: post #131
znnajdla wrote: post #74

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 back…

Great post, and interesting setup - harkens to days of old, when this was simply how things were done in the first place - but one question that I have, apropos: >.. serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers. What is your network connectivity like for this setup? Presumably you operate in a building capable of giving you fiber, with a fixed IP, or something like that…

Gigabit fiber with static IP for about 40 EUR per month. I plan to make it redundant with a second gigabit fiber connection from a different provider but haven’t done that yet.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#187

Post by palata »

snayan wrote: post #161
palata wrote: post #49

> 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.

I assume your circle is mostly tech people? Outside that bubble, it's pretty obvious. People just want easy, don't understand security in many cases, it's the simplest path. Even absent the above. Imagine a signup flow. I can either click or I can go through a manual flow with input fields. The former is much faster than the latter. It surprises you people choose the path of least resistance?

It does not surprise me that people choose the path of least resistance. I find it sad that they happily connect everything to Google/Apple.

What surprises me is that it is a "conversion killer". So if you ask people to create an account, it's sooooo very hard for them that they will just leave. And spend the next 30 minutes scrolling TikTok, I guess?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#188

Post by mort96 »

fsflover wrote: post #183
znnajdla wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not anti American, that’s not the main point of my setup. The main point is I want to own it, not rent it. Apple doesn’t control my production setup after it’s in my hands. Macs from 10 years ago still work.

> Apple doesn’t control my production setup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114

I imagine these Mac Minis aren't logged in to an Apple ID. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't force you to connect your hardware to their cloud.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#189

Post by palata »

williamdclt wrote: post #90
palata wrote: post #49

> 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.

You really don't? It's just a ton easier for most users: it's (almost) like already having an account. Just click a couple times and you're in, no typing at all, no email confirmation or anything like that. I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?) and I know how to use a password manager, but I easily understand how 90-99% of the population doesn't care…

That users choose to link their account to Google when they can does not surprise me.

What surprises me is that if they cannot do it, they will just leave. The post says it is a "conversion killer".

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#190

Post by znnajdla »

fsflover wrote: post #183
znnajdla wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not anti American, that’s not the main point of my setup. The main point is I want to own it, not rent it. Apple doesn’t control my production setup after it’s in my hands. Macs from 10 years ago still work.

> Apple doesn’t control my production setup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252114

You can setup a Mac without an Apple ID. To be honest iCloud is garbage. Almost all Mac App Store apps are available without the App Store.
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