Moving away from US cloud services • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#141

Post by Foobar8568 » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:52 AM UTC

pzo wrote: post #106

frereubu wrote: post #58

> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it's too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google's index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The real takeawa…

he mentioned also Quad9 - Cloudflare DNS replacement. I didn't know about and will probably switch to it. My other picks: SEARCH: qwant (france) LLM: mistral (france), librechat.ai, openwebui VPN: mullvad (sweden), protonVPN (swiss) AUTH: OpenID (sadly seems like not many sevices implement it) CLOUD: Hetzner (germany), OVHCloud (france) MAPS: here wego, openstreetmap EMAIL: protonMail (swiss), fastmail (australia) DN…

Yes, but nobody competes with AWS, Azure or GCP, everything else is easy. And most likely, most of the services/saas you mentionned relies on "US" cloud infrastructure.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#142

Post by teekert » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:52 AM UTC

CER10TY wrote: post #113

teekert wrote: post #7

I find the Proton tools to be a joy to use and I use them for my business. For clients, I can't do that to them. Microsoft completely dominates and people just expect to be able to video call, chat, work on docs, etc. MS365 remains incredible value for money and pretty optimal for normies.

Would you recommend moving from Google Workspace to Proton? Including emails and so on.

Well, there are no (classical) office tools. There is a text editor, but no spreadsheet. Their "Drive" solution is very mvp, you can collaborate on text docs, but it's very minimal.

Email is great, looks great, fast, nice feature set. Calendar is mvp-ish, I can accept invites and they go into the calendar and they have nice links to Teams or Meet etc, pretty seamless. They also have widget for a iPhone now, but it's early days.

ProtonPass is great, at least as great as BitWarden, sharing credentials with family and colleagues is a lot easier (not that "organizations" stuff, just click, share, done).

My iPhone syncs pictures to Proton Drive, but the app needs to be opened to do that, which is annoying. Other than that, works well, pics are safe. I really want a Linux client and an API (or rsync endpoint?) so I can push backups there (I have 3 TB drive for the family/business combined).

Their Bitcoin wallet was wasted effort if you ask me, would have preferred video chat or something. Make it more like NextCloud with a dashboard perhaps.

But when they make a new product, it's mvp but generally immediately works very well. I have a lot of trust in their solutions to just work.

But you can use almost everything on the free tier, so just try it out! The migration tool also works really well.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#143

Post by pbiggar » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:52 AM UTC

At Tech for Palestine, we've been investigating moving off many US based cloud services, with the intent of providing training, guidance, etc, for the broad population on how to do it and where to go.

Our main conclusion so far is that many of the platforms that we look at, such as Signal or Protonmail, need serious UX improvements before they can be used by any serious chunk of the population (though for a HN audience, they can mostly put up with it).

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#144

Post by wkat4242 » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:53 AM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #118

system2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OVH and Hetzner are excellent companies. I doubt there would be any problem with them in the future.

OVH is an absolute joke. People are really quick to forget the fire that destroyed one of their data centers a few years ago and which did not get addressed in any way by OVH for months. They also learned nothing from it, and are repeating the exact same mistakes. I stopped hosting even my personal blog on OVH because of how garbage it is.

Yes they are such chaos internally. Even their support tells you different things every time. I kept having issues around my IRC bouncer on one of my servers (kimsufi, their budget brands). Some support people said yeah no issue as long as you don't do anything illegal. Others said I'd get insta-banned, and sometimes I did have issues and had to call them to get re-enabled.

Now, I have to admit I haven't been a customer of them for 10 years due to exactly this. But yes the fires exposed a lot of the same I left them for.

I left to go to DigitalOcean but it became too expensive and then I found Scaleway which I'm a happy customer of for years now.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#145

Post by Lutger » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:53 AM UTC

frereubu wrote: post #58

> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it's too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google's index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The real takeawa…

That is only the case if you think of migrating as an all-or-nothing. The services that he did manage to migrate went quite smoothly. If he would get stuck with one or two services, was it still worth it to migrate the ones he did manage? If you think it has all been in vain, then yes - its a different takeaway. But obviously Martijn does things step by step and I imagine he is happy even with the progress he made.

In other words, the question is 'is it easy to migrate to a service for which decent alternatives exist', rather than 'do decent alternatives exist for every service you depend on?'

You takeaway depends on what question you are most concerned with.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#146

Post by Foobar8568 » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

pmdr wrote: post #96

ptsneves wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am migrating away from Proton. In theory they check all marks, in practice they fail in delivering baseline functionality in all categories. 1. The Web interface email is so-so, but the proxy email bridge is really heavy and takes a huge amount of disk space. It also makes my computer start flying from time to time. The iOS email client(very important as they dont support standard protocols) is just useless. The te…

> 3. ProtonVPN: Good on paper, totally untrusted and blocked by the internet. I can't navigate without filling 10 captchas or just be outright blocked. Even residential IPs are being blocked nowadays, we have Cloudflare to thank for that.

I get banned within 5 minutes when I browse Hermes or LV websites, fun stuff...

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#147

Post by MaKey » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

aetherspawn wrote: post #62

Hey so I’m pretty sure you can host your own business mail for free these days without a static IP. This is basically how it would go: Cloudflare Tunnel installed on your box (free) Cloudflare Email Worker connected to your domain which writes emails to a KV store (generous free tiers) Cloudflare Worker that downloads the emails from the KV store and uses Worker TCP sockets to send it to your mail server over the tun…

If you don't have a static IP you could just rent a cheap VPS and host your mail server there or just use it as a gateway for your home server. No need to use Cloudflare.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#148

Post by cbg0 » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #105

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect is the enemy of good. The EU has it's flaws, but if you can't see the difference between the US privacy climate and the EU privacy climate then you need a reality check.

Yup, in the USA you can still have VPN server that is not storing logs, something that is simply illegal in European Union countries. In the USA you can purchase prepaid SIM card in Wallmart with cash, put it in your phone and you have anonymous phone number, again, this is illegal in Europe in a typical stupid European way, as any criminal who needs an anonymous card would pull in to the retailer some drunk or homel…

Mullvad is based in Sweden which is part of the EU: https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy

Obviously, it goes without saying you should never trust something you can't verify, regardless of which country the VPN operator is based in.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#149

Post by chgs » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:55 AM UTC

CER10TY wrote: post #110

noirscape wrote: post #45

A shame that OP recommends Proton. The fact they don't support open email protocols like IMAP/SMTP without an extremely frustrating proxy setup is what ultimately turned me away from their service. Being able to "just" use a native mail client is pretty much a must. The vendor lock-in from something like Proton feels way worse as a result. Can't speak to Proton Pass, but it strikes me as a replacement that seems unne…

What's a good alternative to Proton? Still haven't migrated my business away from Google Workspace, and I was thinking Proton would be a good alternative, but apparently not if they don't even support IMAP/SMTP.

I use Zoho for my personal email. They aren’t European but they aren’t American.

Crucially though it’s easy enough to migrate to another provider of self just by updating my mx records.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#150

Post by mhitza » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:55 AM UTC

frereubu wrote: post #58

> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it's too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google's index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The real takeawa…

> It feels like there's a real opportunity here for European companies to step up and make a big play, but will they?

Big plays are possible only with big capital, and that isn't what happens in the EU tech market.

Lack of serious VCs is a problem on one hand, but to blame is also the EU Horizon program which will favor large established companies (which innovate very little), and the fact that the funding direction changes with hype cycles (in 2020 that was digital transformation, in 2024 it was AI and similar).