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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

coinerella.com

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Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#171

Post by flexagoon »

bjourne wrote: post #118
zelphirkalt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean when using "sign in with" and then using a shitty password for your social media account? If you use e-mail and password with a good password manager, that runs locally on your device and generate good random passwords, it is unlikely you will end up on haveibeenpwned, and even if one website does shit, the blast radius is only one account on one website.

You'll still have your e-mail address exposed, which you may not want if it is to some random porn site. Moreover, password managers do not work if you use multiple devices for log in, which most people actually do.

Email aliasing is a thing

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#172

Post by rithdmc »

Macha wrote: post #163
rithdmc wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I'm not sure non-technical people have a good understanding of or experience with password less email login either. While doing tech support I've seen people get very confused at the need to open another app to login in or the fact that they're now logged in in the webview of their email app and not logged in in the app or browser they had been using (especially if the first thing that web view does is pop up a giant…

I can't stand the 'use the app' nag modals!

Thanks for your insight. Outside of being a consumer, and as a security engineer one who appreciates things like passwordless, my experience comes from my employers passwordless rollout. The sentiment is broadly positive, but we would veer to a technical user base, and sentiment misses the nuance you brought up.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#173

Post by msh »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #153
znnajdla wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Presumably you have a home where you live? Yes, but not where my customers live. The whole point of "sovereignty" is to serve customers from a location that is bound by the laws of _their_ jurisdiction, not mine.

But for that it does not matter that much where the servers are located, more where the company controlling them is located.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#174

Post by tecleandor »

apexalpha wrote: post #169
HenriTEL wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can still selfhost MinIO you just have to pay. You also pay for software when renting a cloud service so this seems similar.

But, as far as I can see in their site, the price for MinIO AIStor isn't even public, you have to "Request Pricing". And that's never a good sign.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#175

Post by throwaway772549 »

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…

How has your experience with Bunny been? I'm quite split on it.

I used to work for a business in a pretty competitive area, where tactics like fake DMCA requests and abuse cases are routinely used to attempt to take down information, be it from Google, or from the CDN/hosting provider. While at first Bunny support seemed understanding of it, later they unceremoniously blocked the account on the basis of too many complaints having been filed, despite all of them being responded to in due time and being proven false.

OTOH, their support staff would respond lightning-fast, which was a breath of fresh air compared to other CDNs we used before.

I could see myself using Bunny for personal projects, or some non-vital business, but probably not for anything with lots of competition.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#176

Post by petcat »

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…

> Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house

I fail to see the point of this when the system you've to decided to run "yourself" is entirely owned and dependent on another American company.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#177

Post by thecopy »

Super timely - thank you! Im in the process of moving the entire stack of my SaaS* fully in EU as well. Hetzner bare-metal, Talos k8s, OVH Object Storage for backups, self-hosted (for now) image repo. For now im still on Cloudflare for CDN, but bunny looks interesting. Using GitOps (FluxCD) as deployment strategy enables no dependencies on e.g. GitHub Actions.

For one thing running on bare-metal @ Hetzner is insane value for money versus GCP GKE. Im a third of the running costs and get ~50x resources.

The only aspect im struggling with is full-disk encryption. Although customer data is still encrypred with envelope encryption in the database, i want to migrate to fully encrypted disks (LUKS + TPM) sooner rather than later. If anyone has any resources and/or experience with this, please let know :)

* Gatana AI MCP gateway: https://www.gatana.ai/

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#178

Post by Sammi »

Daegalus wrote: post #129
sixtyj wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah yeah I see CDN77 has no signup button and just says "Talk to sales" instead. That's not helpful to small self hosters.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#179

Post by znnajdla »

petcat wrote: post #176
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…

> Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house I fail to see the point of this when the system you've to decided to run "yourself" is entirely owned and dependent on another American company.

I’m not anti American, that’s not the main point of my setup. The main point is I want to own it, not rent it. Apple doesn’t control my production setup after it’s in my hands. Macs from 10 years ago still work.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#180

Post by danelski »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #130
danelski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

That post mostly concerned infrastructure, you won't likely run the same managed DB with 2 different providers, for example, but you can well offer sign-in with EU/non-EU options, and as long as the first one is viable, I'd say that would already be a win in terms of OP's goals.
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