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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

#71

Post by alias_neo »

adamors wrote: post #11
xvilka wrote: post #3

Codeberg would make a better choice if we speak about EU source code forges. And Forgejo instead of Gitea, which is nowadays controversial project.

What makes Gitea controversial nowadays, I'm out of the loop.

"Forgejo was initially created in December 2022 as a fork of Gitea. The fork occurred after a for-profit limited corporation ran by the lead maintainer of the project, Lunny Xiao, silently transferred Gitea's trademarks and operations to the company and began to establish an open-core model."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgejo

Also see: https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/

EDIT: HN discussion on the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#72

Post by palata »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #17

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.

This is a weird take. It is completely arbitrary.

I could say that you cannot run entirely on US technology, because electronics comes from China. Does that mean that we should just strive to move everything to China, so that we only depend on them?

Makes no sense to me.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#73

Post by nickdothutton »

Enjoyable article, thanks. I'd like to see a section on "layer 8" (or 9? whatever we are calling it). The regulatory layer. There seem to be so many uncertainties in Europe (and to a slightly lesser extent, the UK) now. I think if starting another company I'd have to give it some serious consideration.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#74

Post by znnajdla »

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 backup and networking redundancy and you're good to go to serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers. You don't need VMs: a single Mac Studio gets you 2–4x the power of m7i.2xlarge on AWS, and pays for itself within a few months of AWS bills. You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs (an unofficial Apple partner). You get free S3-compatible object storage with zero ongoing storage costs with MinIO (yes it's redundant even if you lose a server, and your hosting provider can't hold your data hostage by charging for egress). Postgres runs like a beast and is incredibly easy to setup - you get zero latency DB because it runs on the same machine, has access to lots of RAM and you're not paying per-GB or per-core. Managed databases are a scam. You don't need an Auth provider, just do passkeys yourself. And the great thing about Apple Silicon hardware is that it is amazingly quiet, reliable, and efficient - you can do thing like run headless browsers 3x faster and cheaper than on standard server hardware because of the unified memory and GPU acceleration, so you're not paying for CI/CD compute by-the-minute or headless browsers either.

This entire stack could give you computing power equivalent to a 25k euro/month AWS bill for the cost of electricity (same electricity cost as running a few fridges 24/7) plus about 50k euros one-time to set it up (about 4 Mac Studios). And yes, it's redundant, scalable, and even faster (in terms of per-request latency) than standard AWS/GCP cloud bloat. Not only is it cheaper and you own everything, but your app will work faster because all services are local (DB, Redis cache, SSD, etc.) without any VM overhead, shared cores, or noisy neighbours.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#75

Post by thorin »

Misteur-Z wrote: post #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…

Can you expand on the Scaleway comment? Would be interested in the details.

Also aren't their data centres all in the Paris area? Do they have any geo-redundancy?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#77

Post by paffdragon »

willy__ wrote: post #37
paffdragon wrote: post #35

I was kind of interested in the content, but I am so overloaded with AI slop by now, that reading this generated text gives me nausea. I was looking to see why they landed on this stack, but there are no alternatives or evaluation criteria listed - given the generated article, I wonder how much of the infra was selected by an LLM.

Claude helped write the article. It is 2026. I proof read it though and yes, giving an LLM a list of specific criteria of what you are looking for in a product is actually a pretty good experience.

If it works for you, it works. I just see the same phrases used repeatedly so frequently nowdays - including my own LLM conversations.

Regarding the use of LLM for picking infra. The issue I usually have with such task is that they frequently omit things - either from the list of options or the features compared. And depending on my familiarity with the topic, I might never notice, which might steer my decision making into a different direction. Basically a certain bias. Sometimes prompting it to repeat reveals more, but ultimately I end up hitting the search and doing my own research, then I might use the LLM again with now more knolwedge and data. Did you run into this too? What was your process?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#78

Post by willy__ »

dizhn wrote: post #65

Authentik would fit very nicely there and eliminate that one large bit that the author says he can't avoid putting on US infra. I am only saying this because he's already self hosting a bunch of things.

Hanko can be self hosted, if needed - it is one of the few products I chose actively to NOT self host. I am aware of Authentik and do like it.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#79

Post by vikaveri »

bjourne wrote: post #62
palata wrote: post #49

> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.

Heard of haveibeenpwned? You'll end up there, eventually.

If you end up, for some reason, being one of those unlucky individuals whose Google account gets banned and all your other accounts are behind Google login, then you truly have been owned.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#80

Post by reddalo »

adamas wrote: post #6
MrAlex94 wrote: 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 ?

+1 for bad experience with OVH, their control panel is a mess (only the Italian provider Aruba is probably worse) and their backend is riddled with bugs. If something is broken in the control panel, the support team candidly invites you to do it via their APIs instead.
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