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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

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Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#311

Post by potamic »

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…

> You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs

Does it do distributed inference? What kinda token speeds do you get?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#312

Post by inquirerGeneral »

palata wrote: post #267
touristtam wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many services do you have subscribed to? from simple PHPBB boards to very much official product and online shops? How do you manage all those username/password? The single point of failure of relying on Google/Apple is real, but so is the manual and laborious process to auth via email/password and the managment that goes with it.

I have 400 entries in my password manager. I manage them with my password manager. There is no single point of failure.

[dead]

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#314

Post by cge »

Daegalus wrote: post #84
dddw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For domains i find Openprovider.eu is pretty cheap imo, especially if you have a lot and buy in a package it is nearly costprice. Their DNS isn't great though, good enough for personal projects but not for business, would set that somewhere else.

Hmm, seems the good prices is only if you subscribe to their subscription. 5 euro a month or 50 euro a year, then the prices get slashed. Othewise their prices are expensive.

Yes, comparing to Porkbun for .com and .net, it looks like you'd need at least around 10 domains before it became cost effective (the .org price there says it is time limited and I think does not reflect recent .org price increases).

There's also the matter that, ethically, openprovider seems to be heavily focusing on domain name speculators as clients; that may be a business many people would not want to support, and their services for people actually using their domains may be poor.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#315

Post by gethly »

I've built gethly.com entirely on my own VPSs, so i was concerned only with VPS providers. People actually might not know that Europe has orders of magnitude more developed IT infrastructure than USA, or China(Asia is actually quite a joke). For every one VPS provider in North America, Europe has 10. Not only that but there are all necessary services one might need - cdn, domains, dns, storage, payments... nothing is missing. I don't see why people think they "need" american companies, except the big three of cloud providers with their gazillion useless services. But 99% of projects don't really need cloud services at all.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#316

Post by tucnak »

Truth be told if you're a European business, U.S. cloud providers weren't a good deal for a long time. Not since the advent of NVMe's and cheap 100G NIC's, well, that's for sure. Let's have a look at AWS R8 class, which is their most recent native instance type with real, modern I/O. Now, these are ostensibly powered by AWS Nitro 6th-gen networking, which is a 600G NIC. However, if you fancy NVMe drives (R8gd) which you do normally, you won't be getting more than 50G full-duplex. If you want to hit 100G+, you will need R8gn instances which don't offer ANY storage. So if your idea of data engineering is not calling from the 90s, well, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place mate!

Good news is you can get PCIe 5.0 servers, I/O gear, and host it yourself for a mere fraction of semi-capable AWS bill.

Bad news it doesn't matter if you don't get enough uplink bandwidth, no control over the routing table in the core routing infrastructure leading up to your WAN, or actual routers capable of hardware-filtering 100 gigabits worth of line rate per link. And you will need all these things if you want to at least try and match what Cloudflare/Cloudfront is doing from routing standpoint. (It will be much harder though to match them from the CDN standpoint...) DDoS protection is overrated, but it's not for reasons people commonly think.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#317

Post by Daegalus »

indigodaddy wrote: post #258
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…

Why do you need to move from Porkbun though? I don't get it.

Porkbun is based in Portland, Oregon, USA. I'm trying to move my infra to EU only stuff.

It was fine when I lived near Bellevue, Washington. And I did live 30 years in the US but I want to divest myself from that shitshow.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#318

Post by vanschelven »

setgree wrote: post #249
vanschelven wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the argument is reversed! The more boring your tech stack, the _easier_ it is to host it anywhere (including Europe). So choosing boring tech is actually an enabler of this (and other) choices down the line. It's only "a political commitment" as long as it doesn't affect you yet; and from the European perspective I'd say "the affecting has begun".

I'd say from this author's POV, his commitments cost him in terms of headaches, costs, and time not spent optimizing for meeting customers' needs: > The parts that were extra hard > Transactional email with competitive pricing. This one surprised me. Sendgrid, Postmark, Mailgun, they all make it trivially easy and reasonably cheap. The EU options exist, but finding one that matches on deliverability, pricing, and dev…

Fair enough... though if I were to push my point: one could also say that dumbing down your mechanisms of email sending (i.e. ditching templates, or pulling the templates to your own codebase) would give the same advantage I talked about earlier of vendor-independance

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#319

Post by wolfhumble »

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…

> For Domains, I am still on porkbun, but i have like 20 domains, and moving them to EU registrars would be pricey. I will do it, just not looking forward to it. Also there are few registrars tht handle all the TLDs i have, nothing like Porkbun.

For .com domains, if the rationale is data sovereignty, GDPR simplicity, avoiding dependence on a handful of American hyperscalers, then from an operational standpoint I don’t see much value in using European-based registrars. Ultimately, these domains remain under U.S. control regardless. If the focus is 'stubbornness' [one of the points in the article], then of course you have other priorities.

Personally I am all for data sovereignty etc, but very seldom for country boycotts.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#320

Post by flomo »

fofoz wrote: post #239

What do American colleagues think when they read about this trend among Europeans to abandon their platforms?

A lot of this discussion actually more about "use baremetal" or "put servers in your closet". HN tells Americans to do the same thing (and hire them to do it).
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