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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

#81

Post by willy__ »

nickdothutton wrote: post #73

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.

I am trying to be on top of the legal stuff. I did start EU first with GDPR compliance and expanding to the UK was kind of low effort. Comparatively little changes are required. I might expand on that in a future article.. all that legal stuff was quite a bit of effort but I got lucky with my lawyer choice and felt very supported from them at reasonable cost.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#82

Post by willy__ »

thorin wrote: post #75
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?

paris, amsterdam, warsaw and I think they are launching or have launched recently in other places

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#83

Post by reddalo »

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.

Speaking of translations, the Italian translation seems fine but it uses English Capitalization of Titles, but that doesn't work in Italian.

It should be "Pronto a trovare il tuo ricambio?", not "Pronto a Trovare il Tuo Ricambio?".

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#84

Post by Daegalus »

dddw wrote: post #51
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 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.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#85

Post by benrutter »

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.

Codeberg is immense buuut it's only intended for open source projects really, so might not be a good fit for all.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#86

Post by Nextgrid »

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.

Ending up on HaveIBeenPwned is only a problem if you reuse passwords.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#87

Post by Epa095 »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #40
adamas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Codeberg only for Open Source ?

Github or other commercial alternatives aren’t for closed source either anymore. Putting closed source code on github is basically asking them to launder it through LLMs

But selfhosted Gitea, which OP chose, IS good for closed source. And codeberg is not.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#88

Post by okanat »

yoavm wrote: post #24
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.

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.

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, in democracies companies from other countries usually get more say and have more lobbying power. Open market system gives more decision powers to global players. Whereas in China or Russia, if you are not serving the goals of the dictatorial rule, you get ousted permanently without a fear of elections.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#89

Post by stackbutterflow »

wvh wrote: post #60
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.

While it's true Europe might not be producing the next Apple or Google, there are lots of alternatives, like national academic login systems, logging into third parties with bank credentials or government IDs... Solutions that depend less on one commercial company capturing the market, that are in place on a national level and work well. It's a different landscape. Factors like current day political turmoil make peop…

What about non EU users? Americans don't second guess themselves when they slap google/apple/meta sign in only. They know everyone in the world will never pause when they see their logo on the buttons. To reach this scale of worldwide adoption for a European service requires a massive amount of investment.

What's even the entry point? Google and Apple make the devices that everyone uses. Even if you build a service like you suggested, how do you ensure that everyone is using it?

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#90

Post by williamdclt »

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.

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 enough and goes the low-friction route.

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