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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

coinerella.com

141–150 of 391 posts

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#141

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?

Once the chips are there in a EU datacenter, no geopolitical change can bring them away. And that already makes some difference.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#142
Ehm sorry but no. Sovereignty means you own the stack not that you just choose other suppliers. Build on EU infra means owning a machine room with some servers, having fiber optic good enough for your traffic and that's is.

What the author describe is just a supplier switch still owning next to nothing.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#143
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.

> I just don't get why people love this.

I wonder if there will ever come a day where the average HN user actually understands how normal people use technology.

Just observe anyone in your social circle that does not "care" about technology and you'll see their reaction to a login prompt when trying, not rarely under time pressure, to access a service they haven't used for a while.

They will sigh, maybe roll their eyes. And who can blame them? The same goes for registering to a new service. Normal people don't use password managers, they don't have Bitwarden with auto-fill, nor do they ever "generate" passwords.

"Sign in with..." offers them a way out of a frustrating experience, it's the device telling them "Hey, would you just like to use this thing you're already logged into instead?" -- yes, obviously they would like that.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#144

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…

I have been self hosting since couple of years, yes I got very very interested in self hosting my apps, away from the cloud overlords, but the major issue is the network.

You'll need business internet plans with redundancy and based on locations that might be prohibitively expensive. Some startups might even require their own AS numbers.

Also the connectivity to the data centers or cloud infra like WAF , CDNs etc will be definitely worse compared to cloud instances. Then comes firewalls, their configuration and their redundancy.

These things will matter if you're serious about your SaaS.You could definitely co-locate, but that's another cost, then comes the redundancy of everything, from servers, to disks to network (routers and switches etc).

I personally believe that modern hardware is pretty reliable and doesn't need redundancy in every layer, but most people won't agree with and when startups have enough money, this doesn't matter to them.

I think the only reason the common public is unable to start SaaS is handling and managing these problems. Redundancy costs a lot. And many startups don't want to deal with it even if it'll help them in long run. They just gather enough cash and throw at the overlords.

I do hope that the general infra should improve so that can properly host their own.

Nevertheless I'm still trying to start something in SaaS space and self host from my home...

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#145

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…

Ah yes, MinIO, that open source S3 alternative that got archived last week. To me that's the biggest problem when self-hosting services. On day to day operations, some times it just breaks and the time to get it back varies from a couple of hours to a couple of days. And for the longer term you regularly have to upgrade things yourself which takes time and energy and is stressing for stateful deployment. And then you have it, at some point maintainers are just exhausted and the project is gone.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#146

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…

What does your networking redundancy setup look like?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#147

My EU stack, works well and is cheap! Hosting and storage: Hetzner and Netcup Domain: ClouDNS with Failover Transactional email: Lettermint CDN: Bunny

My advice and experience is don't use Netcup. They are abysmal at customer service. I once registered a domain with them, and hadn't even paid, but then couldn't get my account deleted at all. Even multiple e-mails did not help and they insisted on keeping my data until half a year later or so. They absolutely behaved like complete holes, and I will never trust them again with anything. I don't know what they do with…

I am using Netcup over the course of 20 years now and tbh never had any problems. Their customer service is very friendly and they responded quickly to me every time. Sorry to hear your story, but I think this is an exception? I had domains there too, but moved away because of functionality. But my main hoster is Hetzner for a decade now. But because of vendor lock out, I am glad to have Netcup too, especially if you consider the price!

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#148
I just signed up up Hetzner

Their menu has:

- Console

- konsoleH

- Robot

- DNS

When I click into Console I get an additional option called "Website"

I have no idea what Robot and konsoleH are.

Is it a prerequisite if you make a cloud platform to make your offering as confusing as possible?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#149
post #131

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…

> Presumably you operate in a building capable of giving you fiber, with a fixed IP, or something like that?

That is not really a rarity these days. I have symmetrical gigabit fibre with a fixed IP here in a Spanish farmhouse 45 minutes from the nearest population centre

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#150
post #30
post #26

Good, honest write up! As users we need to make more efforts to move out of the American ecosystems. Cloudflare is just so convenient to take only one example. OT, about the finished product (hank.parts): the French translation and tone is a little rude. For one, it uses "tu" instead of "vous", which does have become customary on Social networks but is still a little bit agressive on a regular website. And "bagnole"…

Interesting. I actually had a human translator do the french translation because I didn't trust deepl/LLMs on certain languages. He was Belgian though. Thanks for the feedback, I will certainly consider it - I don't speak french myself.

I agree with them, the French translation is way too casual/aggressive compared to the English text.

I wouldn't trust this website.

It comes across as influencer speech targeted to edgy young people with a touch of "how do you do, fellow kids?".

Pretty sure a modern LLM would yield a better one.

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