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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

#111
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github or other commercial alternatives aren’t for closed source either anymore. Putting closed source code on github is basically asking them to launder it through LLMs

But selfhosted Gitea, which OP chose, IS good for closed source. And codeberg is not.

Alternative of that is self hosted forgejo

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#112

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…

Thanks for the post. How do you currently deal with HD failures/redundancy? That’s my main concern leaving a managed database provider.

I've designed our app so that there are only two stateful services that matter: Database and Disk. Everything else is cattle, you can shut down or spin up new instances and the load balancer redirects requests with no impact. Making Postgres redundant is a matter of careful configuration with PGBouncer + HAProxy + Patroni. However for a long time we had a much simpler setup: just restore a new database from backup on a new machine if the main one failed (one-time simple script run manually - not automatic, means a little bit of downtime if there's a failure, but it worked). Or you could use CockroachDB. Making disk redundant: just use MinIO for S3-like disk (that's also where DB backups are stored). You can lose up to 2 out 4 of your servers and you lose nothing.

With this setup if 1 or 2 Mac Studios fail (or need to be restarted for updates) everything just keeps running smoothly with no customer impact. It also helps that the app itself is on the Elixir BEAM (Phoenix) so everything "just works" across all machines.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#113
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?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#115
post #108

> 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 her…

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.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#117

In conclusion from the `What you realistically can't avoid` section is that running entirely on non american services will never happen. Unless some entity pours hundreds of billions (trillions?) of euros into solving this over multiple decades there will be no way to replace google ads and sign in with google/apple. The AI part seems to be the easiest thing to solve in the list, that says something.

Agreed mate, it took absolute trillions of Euros for "Sign in with VK" to become a common option in Russia. No clue how they did it while also waging wars.

"Sign in with LINE" in Japan? Quintillions of Yen were spent.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#118
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heard of haveibeenpwned? You'll end up there, eventually.

You mean when using "sign in with" and then using a shitty password for your social media account? If you use e-mail and password with a good password manager, that runs locally on your device and generate good random passwords, it is unlikely you will end up on haveibeenpwned, and even if one website does shit, the blast radius is only one account on one website.

You'll still have your e-mail address exposed, which you may not want if it is to some random porn site. Moreover, password managers do not work if you use multiple devices for log in, which most people actually do.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#119
post #98

A lot of people are over romanticizing on Hetzner. The hard truth is that Hetzner is a great provider for bare metal machines and extremely competitive pricing, but it's extremely demanding to run production workloads there without a dedicated infra guy. Claude won't wake up in the middle of the night solving the things helped you provision in an acceptable timeframe. If you are serious about your product SLOs, hyper…

Hetzner is a very particular product. They openly cop to being "overly cautious" with even letting people open accounts because they're playing with razor thin margins: I wouldn't engage with an organization like that for serious production workloads.

At least, where "serious" is defined as making enough money that paying AWS $200 a month for $20 a month worth of compute is worth it in exchange for an actual SLA*, paid support, and knowing that even if you drop of the face of the Earth, the account will probably run unfunded months before your users even notice.

I've been bitten by using "quirky" tier-3 providers for savings on projects that really should have just ate the cost of a bigger provider.

(* Yes an SLA is not a magic uptime guarantee, but it creates an expectation which is a lot better than nothing.)

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#120
post #108

> 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 her…

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 at least your user management and session handling stay in Europe, even if the OAuth flow touches Google or Apple.

You can at least put "Sign in with Spotify" first before Apple/Google - they have social login. I've even seen apps that have nothing to do with music offer it as an option.

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