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Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

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Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#31

Post by embedding-shape »

LucaSiviero wrote: post #26

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

> is there a real alternative that covers what they do?

Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar?

I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#32

Post by anonzzzies »

LucaSiviero wrote: post #26

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

Stripe is stupidly expensive ; I have Mollie and Ingenico with tailored deals which make Stripe seems like the dumbest thing you can do. I don't know what their defaults are, but I tried to reason with Stripe and they said i'm too small; no problem with these two. And I can drive to their HQ and ask what's up if anything is up, which I would prefer even at higher fees.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#33

Post by karambahh »

LucaSiviero wrote: post #26

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

Funilly enough, payment might be the area where it's the easiest to find a credible european alternative. Adyen is an enormous PSP Mollie is aiming at smaller companies.

Scaleway, OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak and others do have pre-packaged, managed services, but you might not find "eveything and anything" that you find at, say, AWS. The other side of the same coin is that you're as vendor-locked if you buid something with one component at SCW, one at Hetzner and the third at Infomaniak... (but you have to manage 3 different invoices...)

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#34

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

rukshn wrote: post #2

I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts. On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pit…

Its. You know. Look around. What our elites and noble families concot. Wirecard. etc.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#35

Post by embedding-shape »

neya wrote: post #28
embedding-shape wrote: post #11

> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate. This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the o…

> Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN... Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?

Yes, because it sounds reasonable at the beginning, then the further you go, the less sense it makes. Ultimately you look up the stuff that felt weird initially, and found the reason why it sounded so weird.

If I never actually noticed it, it wouldn't be slop, that I'd agree with. But in this case, I did notice, so it is slop.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#36

Post by Scroll_Swe »

Let me repost another comment of mine.

TLDR: Yes, ofc we use Microsoft, Amazon (AWS), Cloudflare and Cisco...

There is even mainstream press articles about it here in Sweden. "dependance on microsoft ooh so bad" etc.

I find it laughable.

Unless you have a time machine to 2005 (EC2 came out in 2006 that should have been the signal) there is no way to compete now. That train has left the platform.

Second, Nokia and Ericsson dominate mobile infra in the west, but that is good I guess as they are EU? What does USA think about that?

Third, let us say you get rid of MS. Now you have no MS but all network infra for broadband is Cisco, Huawei, Juniper etc. Good luck ripping that out. And for what?

Same with AI. Mistral was amazing at first, Le Chat. Almost as good, generous free limits, good docs. Now? Just plain bad. Deepseek is better (I dislike china so I avoid it). EU should have gone in 500% the moment Mistral showed promise.

But lately we let USA and China take the lead on everything and EU can write a strongly worded letter after about how bad it is.

People will "care" when EU starts making good stuff again.

And lastly lol, people do know everything ends in Taiwan in the end right?

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#37

Post by Scroll_Swe »

embedding-shape wrote: post #31
LucaSiviero wrote: post #26

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

> is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar? I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month…

It's not that they cannot be found.

But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#38

Post by embedding-shape »

anonzzzies wrote: post #32
LucaSiviero wrote: post #26

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get clos…

Stripe is stupidly expensive ; I have Mollie and Ingenico with tailored deals which make Stripe seems like the dumbest thing you can do. I don't know what their defaults are, but I tried to reason with Stripe and they said i'm too small; no problem with these two. And I can drive to their HQ and ask what's up if anything is up, which I would prefer even at higher fees.

Stripe, AWS and many of the "defaults" people use are extremely expensive, but since it's mostly VC-funded startups who foots the bills, no one seem to care. But once you're doing bootstrapped/long-lived stuff, you need to start caring, and once you see the terms and prices of other things, you start to realize how ridiculously over-priced AWS, Stripe, et al actually are.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#39

Post by graemep »

rukshn wrote: post #2

I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts. On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pit…

You switch from talking about Europe to talking about the EU half way through. The article was about Europe (excluding Russia and a few others).

> there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated

Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both.

There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare.

> On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US.

A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.

Re: Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

#40

Post by AznHisoka »

I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companied are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure

https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which...

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