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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

#381

Post by amluto »

palata wrote: post #377
amluto wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passkey signup could be almost as easy. Type email address, click register, invoke WebAuthn flow (which is no more complex than social registration), done. Maybe you need email address validation for some reason, in which case it’s a wee bit more complex. Ideally there would never even be an option to make a password unless passkeys are unavailable.

> Ideally there would never even be an option to make a password unless passkeys are unavailable. I like passkeys, but ideally it should always be an option to make a password, too.

Sure, and there’s a UI for rejecting passkey enrollment. I’m just saying that there’s no need for anywhere near as many clicks to enroll a passkey as are often needed.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#382

Post by k4rli »

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.

If you decide to visit such awful sites then the least you could do is not use primary email for this.

I don't think it makes sense to even have a "primary email". I've completely separated work, shopping, banking, gaming etc mailboxes.

Also how do password managers not work? Bitwarden syncs instantly across devices just fine.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#383

Post by Daegalus »

matteocontrini wrote: post #374
Daegalus wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it need to make money, it's just a registry of information and a small about page with a list of entries. It probably runs on sqlite on a single $5 VM. Or a single db. Other than that, maybe ads

Because they also offer free DNS and email. There are no ads.

It looks like DNS is just shared CloudDNS, and email is limited. From the FAQ:

How reliable is dot.bs DNS hosting?

dot.bs is backed by ClouDNS. ClouDNS serves over two billion DNS queries per day, so I can confidently say your DNS is in good hands.

Do I really get free email?

Yes! In order to make this possible, there are some limitations. A maximum of 5 email accounts per domain (unlimited domains) A maximum of 5 outgoing emails per hour, per account (to prevent spammers) A maximum of 75 MB storage per account If these limits are a problem for you, please reach out and we can figure something out.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#384

Post by bambax »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #337
bambax wrote: 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"…

> As users we need to make more efforts to move out of the American ecosystems. While I support the spirit, it's important to acknowledge the reality of the current situation with the US (and the rest of the world). It has little to do with SaaS services and everything to do with energy and defense . Europe imports more than half it's energy. The United States and Russia are both net exporters (Russia significantly s…

Ok, but nobody's disputing this? Tech dependency should be easier to unwind, then defense, then energy.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#385

Post by La-Douceur »

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…

When you say "baremetal servers in-house", are you talking about colocation in a european cloud provider like Hetzner, or are you talking about actually self hosting at home in your garage like some hobbyist do ?

If you're talking about self hosting in your garage, I wonder how you handle networking, I mean, even if you have a good optic fiber with 1 or 10gbps, if you start getting real significant traffic, wouldn't you end up getting emails from your provider asking you why you are using 10000x more bandwith than your neighbors, and eventually be cut off ?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#386

Post by chias »

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…

From a practical standpoint, would you consider "Google Germany GmbH" to essentially be just a reference to Google, beholden to everything that matters to Alphabet headquartered in the United States?

If so, Nebius is just a fancy name for Yandex, beholden to everything that matters to Yandex LLC headquartered in Russia. They just chose a distinctly different name, presumably to avoid the association. When we were doing a deep-dive into cloud GPU providers, legal counsel veto'd them for this reason.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#387

Post by Nurw »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #50
willy__ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Porkbun has .party for $21.09 (bar the first year promotion, not sure about VAT) and INWX (DE, VAT included) has it 32.80€ . It is definitely more but not as scary as you made it sound.

Huh, thats weird. I am from Norway, and I have always used domainname.shop, a Norwegian service. .party seems to be at around 7.49€ a year (bar the first year promotion)

It is not a super fancy website, and the company is pretty old, but I don't really need a lot from my DNS provider anyways.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#388

Post by RebootStr »

willy__ wrote: post #30
bambax wrote: 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.

The german translation is also slightly off. E.g. instead of: "Poste ein Foto und lass die Community dir passende Angebote schicken" you would probably write: "Poste ein Foto und lasse dir passende Angebote von der Community schicken"

And you do not send an "Angebot" to a doorstep. A German would interpret this as the offer in written form send to the doorstep (not the part as probably intended)

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#389

Post by okanat »

yoavm wrote: post #101
okanat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where democratic governments at a disadvantage. Europe is also more integrated into US market. For example, killing access to Google ads ecosystem will make 100s of thousands or even millions of people unemployed. Apple and Google have multiple offices in Europe. A divorce with US will again make a huge amount of people lose their very high paying jobs. Unlike China and Russia those people can vote. Moreover,…

I think those things are very hard to predict. Yes, many Europeans will stop working for American companies and lose their very high paying jobs. On the other hand, the EU as a whole will stop sending billions of euros to the American economy, and at least some of this money will be invested in creating local alternatives; Those who worked for American companies will probably find their place in these alternatives. E…

My worry there isn't (just) Europeans who directly work for American companies but Europeans who work in the _markets_ that US companies created.

For example almost all digital marketing agencies are almost pure resellers of big tech products: ads on Facebook, Google or Microsoft networks. Similarly majority backend solutions are delivered over 3 big cloud providers' specialized products like AWS Lambda or GCP BigQuery. The definition of Mobile Software developer is someone who writes software for Google or Apple platforms. The entire fields will disappear overnight.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#390

Post by Hrun0 »

drcongo wrote: post #362
Hrun0 wrote: post #328

Can confirm on Hetzner. I'm building a SaaS on it right now and had to request a VPS limit increase. I was so worried and carefully crafted my request message. I was bracing for a multi-day back-and-forth but they just... did it in like 10 minutes lol > The pricing is almost absurdly good compared to AWS, and the performance is solid. If you've never spun up a Hetzner box, you're overpaying for cloud compute. Yep!

My support experience with Hetzner has been first class, every single time. They're honest, responsive, proactive and helpful. My support experience with Digital Ocean has been abysmal, every single time. Our latest experience was a misconfigured or malfunctioning Valkey cluster, we provided a ton of supporting information, their tech team magically fixed it and closed the ticket, and their support people tried to bl…

3 days after I said that they are affordable they have increased the prices by 38%.

I wil never say anything nice about Hetzner ever again lol

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