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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

#91
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 makin…

I do understand what you mean with bias.. some models where quite stubbornly ignoring things like "I want made in EU - not GDRP compliant - not one office or data center in the EU". I remember this being especially painful for TEM and market email providers. Usually they suck at finding the right pricing data at first try.. so I ended up throwing screenshots of pricing pages. Now that I am writing this up, in some instances manually comparing them would have been faster :D ... The bias might come from the huge amount of US dominance in training data and might not even be intentional. In some niches you don't have many options, that's what I tried leaning on in the article.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#92

My EU stack, works well and is cheap! Hosting and storage: Hetzner and Netcup Domain: ClouDNS with Failover Transactional email: Lettermint CDN: Bunny

My advice and experience is don't use Netcup. They are abysmal at customer service. I once registered a domain with them, and hadn't even paid, but then couldn't get my account deleted at all. Even multiple e-mails did not help and they insisted on keeping my data until half a year later or so. They absolutely behaved like complete holes, and I will never trust them again with anything. I don't know what they do with user data. Maybe they systems are just so terrible, that it is a huge effort for them to go and comply with GDPR deletion request and then they just don't do it.

Also their web interface doesn't allow you to delete your domain, even if you have not paid yet. So anyone could come and make some account and register a domain, but then not pay and they wouldn't remove it from their systems. The feel of their website is very antiquated and due to not being able to delete your domains, feels buggy.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#93
post #62
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.

Risk Bob's Salad Shack leaking an inconsequential, unique, credential or bind everything to the whims and identity of a single organization; hmm.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#95

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 CDN, you can try CDN77, they have servers all around the world. No affil, just they are based in Europe (Prague) :)

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#96
post #62
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.

Sign-on with the external identity provider doesn't help if data related to your account like the billing information, your government ID info etc. are released in the breach, that's the sore point.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#98
A lot of people are over romanticizing on Hetzner. The hard truth is that Hetzner is a great provider for bare metal machines and extremely competitive pricing, but it's extremely demanding to run production workloads there without a dedicated infra guy. Claude won't wake up in the middle of the night solving the things helped you provision in an acceptable timeframe. If you are serious about your product SLOs, hyperscales shine, and you can only accept the "cloud tax".

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#99
post #98

A lot of people are over romanticizing on Hetzner. The hard truth is that Hetzner is a great provider for bare metal machines and extremely competitive pricing, but it's extremely demanding to run production workloads there without a dedicated infra guy. Claude won't wake up in the middle of the night solving the things helped you provision in an acceptable timeframe. If you are serious about your product SLOs, hyper…

are you aware of https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s ? I am using it and I can wholeheartedly recommend.

Re: I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure

#100
post #62
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.

People will know that my password was y!2TvM8h3dpvw4 for one particular website at some point. What do I lose here? Google/Apple incurs much greater risk that is entirely out of your control.
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