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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

#121

Post by wvh »

TrackerFF wrote: post #42

Here in Norway (and probably Sweden, too) BankID is a widely used authentication system, and most domestic services will use that as a auth / login. Only "drawback" is that it requires 2FA, which is quite trivial today. But there are still tons of users that want their "login with FB / Google / etc." . And a last but: If using such auth systems, one would have to account for all the different systems unique to countr…

Many European countries have decent authentication, banking and payment system alternatives or even innovative solutions. I think, like usually, it's just a problem to break out of national or regional circles into something pan-European.

A lot of people seem to agree that relying on a handful of too powerful American companies, especially in the ad and social media space, is a terrible idea and running foul of privacy requirements. Remains to be seen if some larger alternatives manage to pop up though. The European landscape is pretty fragmented.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#122

Post by piltdownman »

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…

How do you handle anti-DDOS, zero-trust and WAF duties to a cloudflare-esque equivalency (e.g. a reverse-proxy style setup)?

While I definitely concur with your conclusions re VMs and GCP hosting overhead, did you benchmark a container based setup in GKE or similar?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#123

Post by anilakar »

Running microservices on Hetzner is a risky move.

Their direct internet connections rarely go down, but links between servers in their internal network suffer from intermittent failures. if you make your service reliable enough to be able to run on a single node, you could have built a monolith in the first place.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#124

Post by bluebarbet »

adamas wrote: post #6
MrAlex94 wrote: post #2

I’ve found Scaleway really good, I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more often here. If it matters, I didn’t go to them because they were specifically an EU org either - when Packet became Equinix Metal and then that got shut down, SCW were the most equivalent in terms of cost / hardware specifications and I often used them in parallel when Packet was still around so as to not have all my eggs in one basket.

I really like Scaleway too ! I went with them because Linode got bought and I thought, since I was moving my things anyway, let's go to a French provider. And I got a bad experience with OVH, so Scaleway it was. But really, I wonder why it's not used more ? Price are maybe a bit high for some things ?

Another bad experience with OVH here. In fact not bad but catastrophic. They enabled 2FA without my consent and then demanded a signed letter on paper by post to let me back into my account. Their online customer service was beyond useless and the nightmare took weeks to resolve. This after I had been a loyal customer for years. Just when I was preparing to punish them by moving, my VPS went up in smoke at that fire in their Strasbourg datacenter. "Oops, our bad", went the email. Beyond parody. It's almost a surprise to me that this company is still in business.

With Hetzner now for several years without incident.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#125

Post by znnajdla »

piltdownman wrote: post #122
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…

How do you handle anti-DDOS, zero-trust and WAF duties to a cloudflare-esque equivalency (e.g. a reverse-proxy style setup)? While I definitely concur with your conclusions re VMs and GCP hosting overhead, did you benchmark a container based setup in GKE or similar?

For now we still use Cloudflare. Considering bunny.net after reading this OPs post.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#126

Post by plufz »

deaux wrote: 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…

Which platforms/avenues do you recommend?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#127

Post by zonkd1234 »

znnajdla wrote: post #112
zonkd1234 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

cheers. Had never heard of MinIO either, very cool.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#128

Post by 63stack »

raincole wrote: post #106
bjourne wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Password manager. Before inevitable "what if your password manager is hacked...," what if your google account is hacked / banned?

You don't even need a password manager, browsers autogenerate secure passwords for you, and they sync between computers/mobile devices.

(I'm saying this from the perspective of "regular people don't want to be inconvenienced like that, obviously you should use an external password manager for security)

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#129

Post by Daegalus »

sixtyj wrote: post #95
Daegalus wrote: post #19

Great post, I did a similar switch mid last year. Hetzner was something I already used, so I just doubled down. I have a single OVH instance where I ma playing with Openclaw, but that was because I was having issues with Hetzner that day on their new instance page (was fixed the next day) I use Bunny for my CDN, I just wish they have the capabilityt to route IPv4 and IPv6 traffic to IPv6 only origins. If your origin…

For CDN, you can try CDN77, they have servers all around the world. No affil, just they are based in Europe (Prague) :)

Right now, I would only switch from Bunny if they allow IPv6-only origin servers and route IPv4 traffic to it.

Also no pricing and a "Talk to sales" only link. Which usually means super expensive, or B2B only. I pay like 10 cents a month on Bunny something

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#130

Post by stackbutterflow »

danelski wrote: post #109
stackbutterflow wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about non EU users? Americans don't second guess themselves when they slap google/apple/meta sign in only. They know everyone in the world will never pause when they see their logo on the buttons. To reach this scale of worldwide adoption for a European service requires a massive amount of investment. What's even the entry point? Google and Apple make the devices that everyone uses. Even if you build a service l…

> They know everyone in the world will never pause when they see their logo on the buttons. As in, that they won't run away when they see them or that they will all happily use them? If you mean the latter, then it's just false. Also, why do you assume that such product would need to be used worldwide all of a sudden? Having something for the local market would be sufficient to call it a success in this instance. The…

> Also, why do you assume that such product would need to be used worldwide all of a sudden

Because I'm talking about not running on any American services. Which Americans can do and do all the time. I don't see how we can reach a point where we can one day not include google/apple sign in and not lose a massive number of potential users. Sure it's possible that one day we'll see a "Sign in with EU login" but below it they're always be sign in with google/apple, for a very long time.

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