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?
I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
141–150 of 391 posts
Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
#142What the author describe is just a supplier switch still owning next to nothing.
Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
#143> 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 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
#144Thank 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…
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
#145Thank 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…
Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
#146Thank 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…
Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
#147My 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…
Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
#148Their 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
#149Thank 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…
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
#150Good, 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 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.