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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

coinerella.com

201–210 of 391 posts

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#201
AWS does have a European sovereign cloud now: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/opening-the-aws-european-so...

Now how bulletproof it is in practice will be tested in years to come, I'm sure. But it seems to be using the same model as AWS in China where a local company licenses and operates the software from AWS.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#202
post #176

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.

Where is your all-European made computer, then?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#203

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…

> Managed databases are a scam.

I, too, once believed this. Then I had the displeasure of watching a $10,000 server fail during Christmas travel (about 20 years ago now). A single RAID drive failed. Then, during the rebuild, a second drive failed. Then the RAID controller itself failed catastrophically, losing all the RAID volume metadata. When we restored from backup, we discovered that the sysadmin who had just quit a few weeks before had lied to us about the backup system, and we had no backups.

This is the sort of black swan event that happens every 5-10 years. It's an unusually bad event, even by black swan standards, but stuff like this happens.

The fundamental problem of self-hosted databases is that you test the happy path every day, but you only test true disaster recovery every 5-10 years. And in practice, this means that disaster recovery will usually fail.

With a managed database service, most of what you're paying goes to making sure that disaster recovery works. And in my experience, it does. I've seen RDS database servers fail catastrophically, and completely rebuild in under 15 minutes with virtually no data loss, with almost no human intervention at all.

If you care about your customers' data, I think that a reputable managed database is the right move until roughly the point that you can pay for a full time database administrator. At that point, sure, roll your own. But do regular disaster recovery tests, lest you discover that a recently departed DBA has been lying to you.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#204
post #164

Its a really good sign that this worked out at all. And the takeaways are enlightening - EU domain registrars might have some bullshit under the hood making the same TLDs more expensive. Might need to investigate - eu needs its own mobile app ecosystem, easy auth, and genAI offerings - - but interested to see why mistral wasnt feasible - other things need to be scaled up to have the community and maturity to function…

Mistral seems great and offers great functionality and maybe fair pricing. However, I have used their LLM API (Le Chat?) in a project and unfortunately the API times out sooooo often. I had to add retry logic and have timeouts of 5 minutes and such, and sometimes there is just never a response from the API. If they could make that more stable ...

(I am using their official Python client library.)

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#206
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My email goes to the same company I can login with so might as well tap the button.

But if there is no Google/Apple button, will you just leave? Like not even create an account? That's what "conversion killer" means.

I won't but a decent % of people do ye.

In fact a decent % of people stops shopping on your site if there's a few ms lag.

At every step a few percent of revenue is lost your competitor takes in.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#207

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 comp…

it's a super cheap "CDN" that runs on Hetzner and random hosts or their colo, it's not as proper as the other ones.

for anything DMCA heavy maybe just buying dedicated servers or something instead could work?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#208
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Where is your all-European made computer, then?

On that subject, I'd be curious to see any computer that's not mostly made in Asia.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

In some countries and with some ISPs, you cannot get a fixed IP address at all, unless you register a business and prove to the ISP that you are running a business. I am guessing they will bill you accordingly then, and still have the same shoddy connectivity. I have seen shoddy connectivity with Pyür in Germany for a whole office building. Even as a business you are not immune to bad ISPs.

I guess Spain benefits from having a former national telecom. Movistar charges me a (outrageous by local standards) €30/month for a static IP on my residential fibre

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#210
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don't? It's just a ton easier for most users: it's (almost) like already having an account. Just click a couple times and you're in, no typing at all, no email confirmation or anything like that. I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?) and I know how to use a password manager, but I easily understand how 90-99% of the population doesn't care…

That users choose to link their account to Google when they can does not surprise me. What surprises me is that if they cannot do it, they will just leave. The post says it is a "conversion killer".

It's not so much that they'll leave, as much as some percentage will abandon during the signup flow. I know somewhere out there are statistics on those who have to click a link in an email only to get distracted by other emails, to say nothing of the time to fill out forms, create a password, save to password manager, open your 2FA app for the more advanced users, etc.
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