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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

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21–30 of 391 posts

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#21
post #6
post #2

I’ve found Scaleway really good, I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more often here. If it matters, I didn’t go to them because they were specifically an EU org either - when Packet became Equinix Metal and then that got shut down, SCW were the most equivalent in terms of cost / hardware specifications and I often used them in parallel when Packet was still around so as to not have all my eggs in one basket.

I really like Scaleway too ! I went with them because Linode got bought and I thought, since I was moving my things anyway, let's go to a French provider. And I got a bad experience with OVH, so Scaleway it was. But really, I wonder why it's not used more ? Price are maybe a bit high for some things ?

I asked myself the same thing, trustpilot is pretty rough on them and a lot of people tell you online to stay away from them. I also had very good support experience so far. Their shared TEM IP had some deliverability issues at times, but they seem to have cracked down on this recently. I am on dedicated IP now, so I can't really judge if there have been improvements.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#23
post #2

I’ve found Scaleway really good, I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more often here. If it matters, I didn’t go to them because they were specifically an EU org either - when Packet became Equinix Metal and then that got shut down, SCW were the most equivalent in terms of cost / hardware specifications and I often used them in parallel when Packet was still around so as to not have all my eggs in one basket.

+1 for Scaleway, I've been migrating some of my customers on it and I love it's simplicity and reliability. Costs are also fine.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#24

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.

Billions of euros over multiple decades? Why?

Seems to me like it's mainly regulation. The thing that makes people in China, or Russia, for example, not use Google - isn't that Yandex / Baidu got tons of investments. It is that people can't easily access Google. If the EU decides to pull the switch (or if the US decides to do so), we have enough competence people here to build a search engine.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#25

Domain TLD is the one administratively completely entangled into USA system while playing a major role on the internet working as it does. ICANN should definitely be an international entity, like UNESCO. All other points are "mere" technical gaps.

I am still baffled.. compare a domain like .party or .parts between porkbun or your major US based providers and a EU based registrar of your choosing.... It's not pretty, at least it wasn't to me.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#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" or "balance une photo" is more than casual.

Maybe the target are young people but I wouldn't bet on it. Average car ownership in Europe is 53, and 55 in France. Share of new vehicle registrations by adults aged 18-34 is below 10% in Europe.

My two cents.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#27
* Scaleway is totally painful/scary on data encryption at rest and in transit, does not feel like your infra/data is isolated from other customers

* OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help big companies going in, they are going somewhere on the SaaS

On most European cloud providers I feel like IAM is crap: workload identity is almost non-existent, API keys management is usually hellish. Same goes for encryption/isolation. I want to hear more technical feedback on most of them, devil is in the details !

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#28

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.

It's possible that will get ""solved"" overnight when some critical service gets cut off or banned in one direction or the other for political reasons.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#29

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…

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Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#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.
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