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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

#131

Post by aa-jv »

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?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#132

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

>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.

Only if you have physical offices and staff in every jurisdiction you're serving.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#133

Post by stackbutterflow »

deaux wrote: post #117
stackbutterflow wrote: post #17

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.

Sign in with LINE and not a single American logo on the log in page?

Also what about AI? Can't solve that with a sub billion euros of investment.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#134

Post by ffsm8 »

zonkd1234 wrote: post #127
znnajdla wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MinIO was a previously open source blob store. It's pretty old, it was basically created right around the time S3 took off.

You should probably reconsider going with it in 2026 unless you're fine with their new (non -opensource) offering. It still has a "free" license, so it might still be an option depending on your priorities.

But there are alternatives around, some being arguably much easier to run/maintain for small deployments like this.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#135

Post by aa-jv »

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.

In my experience its been the users who principally only have a mobile phone - i.e. no desktop - and therefore want the benefit of the phone-managed account system tied to .. biometrics, etc...

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#136

Post by lysace »

yoavm wrote: post #55
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…

Sounds like the EU Digital Identity Wallet project: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...

Development happens on Github, (perhaps) ironically.

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#137

Post by magicalhippo »

zonkd1234 wrote: post #127
znnajdla wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do note MinIO is deprecated and no longer maintained, discussed here[1]. There are plenty of alternatives though, most mentioned in the referenced submission.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000041

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#138

Post by znnajdla »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #132
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…

>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. Only if you have physical offices and staff in every jurisdiction you're serving.

Presumably you have a home where you live? That's your physical office. And no you don't need a presence in every jurisdiction you serve. Visa payment network serves the world from the US.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#139

Post by aa-jv »

anilakar wrote: post #123

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.

I think this is short-sighted - there are many applications where a single node is all one needs, and this is a huge part of Hetzners user base, presumably.

A bit of anecdote from me, as a decades-long Hetzner user: I have personally felt no real impact whatsoever with their internal network suffering from intermittent failures. The downtime incurred by Hetzner admin I've experienced is measured in minutes, in my case over a 10 year period as a customer...

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#140

Post by rithdmc »

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.

HN is going to skew towards people with password managers & concerns about vendors locking you out. I think most people just want low friction - be that 'Sign in with', or passwordless-based authentication like 404media (you want to sign in? You've been emailed a code)
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