For the past days I've been participating(albeit over Teams) in a conference relevant to my industry (intel), basically startups and established companies showcasing their products to a closed audience of EU gov. officials.
One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this.
Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount of migrations I've helped moving data from US to EU already is higher this calendar year than all the other years of my career.
>I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before
Its not about public opinion, but rather data sovereignty requirements. Certain types of data must be processed within servers located in the EU, regardless of where the company's HQ is. That's why you see most SaaS platforms nowadays offer a EU-only version.
His point is that those laws were basically ignored, until now.
The conversation started all the way back, with the Patriot Act, but until now the dynamic was roughly: politicians write lofty laws that pay lip service to data sovereignty, then add enough loopholes so that nothing has to change in practice, and nobody really cares.
Now people do care, and they don't want to use those loopholes. It's pretty obvious why things have changed.
There are no laws that force companies to store all (generic) data in Europe. If there were then the companies asking about migrations just now would already be in breach.
You’re probably thinking of PII (GDPR/EUDPR) and even there there are plenty of loopholes, creative interpretations, and “privacy shields”.
The push for sovereignty doesn’t just come from regulators, it comes from the companies themselves who lost trust in the US, and also from European providers who jumped on the opportunity to make a killing.
Which is just wildly backwards. It is the same mindset of the cyberpunk "privacy advocates" of the early 2000s, move your stuff to Sealand or Switzerland.
The fundamental flaw with this plan is if your fear is genuinely of the United States, your data is far more protected inside the US. The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.
Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data. Or ask a European intelligence service to use the much more lax laws to compel its disclosure.
Yes, data collection happens on US soil. But ask anyone who has worked on the inside how much of a pain it is to view or process USPER data.
>The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.
there have been several bombshell revelations in the last 1-2 decades which indisputably show that the US intelligence community also has (effectively) no restrictions operating on US citizen networks and servers, and often does so with the direct help of US companies.
the legal standards are worthless when they can just be ignored without consequence. when the standards happen to work, just buy the data from the private sector.
secondly, these changes are also about mitigating any retaliatory decisions made when the US government gets upset at how tall another country's leader is, or whatever.
I wish I believed that they have to go to the FISA court for much of anything any more. Instead they go to Palantir and the like which simply buy the data and aggregate it. Very similar to the process of money laundering. And for the data that can't be bought there's the five eyes work around.
The fear is not "NSA is snooping on our customer data", it's "Trump has a beef with our premiere minister/president, and Jeff Bezos accepted Trumps request to turn off AWS from them" that's the fear.
We're far beyond the default assumption that NSA snoops on absolutely everything, and more about protection ourselves from trade wars, tariffs and similar blockages as what Microsoft did with the ICC.
Compelling Microsoft to turn off your Office 365 at least requires Microsoft to be complicit. Sovereign infrastructure didn't protect Venezuela or Iran.
Well, there are also noises about the SaaS company preferably not being American. Apparently there's a US law that compels US companies to divulge data on their users even if the data is hosted outside of the US. (I'm not sure this wouldn't happen anyway, without such a law.)
Most nations can coerce information from corporate entities within their nation, even information that corporation holds outside said country. To what extents that coercion can hold will of course vary by local laws, customs and the people in charge. The US has a fairly large media footprint, not to mention it's actual physical size and outsized influence even then. So it is more covered and visible.
Inside the US, the biggest concerns similarly come with China, which I consider a bigger risk. For better or worse, if you're inside the US, you're probably better off holding as much of your presence as you can inside the US as EU requirements can actually be more harmful than helpful in terms of compliance. There are also certain protections and resistance you can take to less than formal (judicial warrant) requests. Only because if you hold an online presence in the EU, and are forced to violate EU laws, then you're in trouble on both sides.
I would assume similar in most cases, though the EU confederation is something I'm far less familiar with where national laws and EU laws conflict, etc. I'm more familiar with US state to federal structures.
I remember when iCloud arrangements required by China was seen as draconian. Now it seems we're not far from people cheering for such laws elsewhere...
There been mumblings for as long as I've been a developer, I remember hearing about "EU data independence" first when the ePrivacy Directive came around, which must have been multiple decades ago at this point.
But yeah, in recent times the sentiment became more urgent. If I were to guess, with zero data in front of me and just judging by what I remember, I think the sentiment really changed first with the ICC blockade that happened last year, then it got really fueled on by the US threats to Greenland's sovereignty, I think that's when organizations and people really got stressed out about moving ASAP.
Around me, the threat to Greenland is what kicked the plans from “okay what mitigations should we envision?” to “alright, let’s go as far to actually run shadow ops to get acquainted with …” to full on move after the invasion.
Trump may genuinely end up being the best salesman European hosting companies ever had. I run one of the tools mentioned in this post (Bugsink) and I literally had an uptick of Danish people/companies (specifically) reaching out to me after Davos.
As someone who've basically started being known as "The guy who helps you move data out of US to Europe" in certain circles, I'm not complaining either :)
Yes, that was the thing that set off all the alarms. Trump 1 said a lot of things but had not completed the Hungary-fication of the US. Trump 1 was also before the Ukraine war!
I feel like the concern started getting popularised during the first Trump administration, because the US were overtly bullying the EU (and others of course). But the main change was that it was done overtly: before that the US has always been a big power trying to... say "defend the interests of the US" abroad. E.g. the US have been spying their allies forever. So I think it was more of a "they should stop bullying us in a few years", and indeed it went back to normal with Biden (again, "defending the interests of the US" and "leveraging their dominant position", which was kind of accepted).
The second Trump administration moved from "overtly bullying" to "behaving like a potential threat". In the second Trump administration, the US has used the tech monopolies against the EU and has become a military threat (not to mention the commercial war with tariffs). For many Europeans, it's not that the US are abusing their dominant position in negotiations anymore: it's that they are not an ally anymore. Not that they are seen as an enemy, but rather an unreliable partner who threatened to become an enemy.
I think that this is a very big shift, and that is why things are actually moving. And I don't think that this will change, because the risk of depending on the US monopolies has now materialised. That cannot be undone.
If even all the shenanigans from the US administration and essentially it threatening to invade European territory did not result in European companies and governments finally doing something about their digital sovereignty, then nothing but a declaration of war would.
I guess they eventually read their own local (US) laws and figured no one cares about that effort since Amazon is still covered by CLOUD Act, regardless of what ccTLD they happen to use for their landing page.
> The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
Once that was in place, AWS could host their "EU" servers on the moon for all I and others care, still not a solution to avoid the claws of the US.
Trump 2 is worse than Trump 1 by far from EU perspective. And it also proved that it wasn't a once-off that Americans will vote in someone who threatens to dismantle NATO, invade Greenland, or start trade wars with allies for no reason.
Also Trump 2 proves without a doubt that at least half of the american voters are absolutely insane or incredibly stupid. For 1 there used to be some doubt.
We in Europe are enjoying roughly 15-20% insane/stupid ratings at this point, which is not great but still a bit better.
Let's face it. Trump 2 is about dismantling democracy. The administration radiates hostility and aggression to anything democratic. In the new national security policy the EU is the adversary of the US. If that isn't a wake-up call.
Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how "if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
If a presidential candidate anywhere else was openly talking about wanting to remove elections and democracy in the country (not to mention triggered an insurrection [?!]), I'm fairly sure they'd almost be automatically disqualified. Really strange situation all around.
>Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of >this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how >"if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
1) Puerto Ricans were called publicly on a Trump rally in New York, an "island of garbage" and they massively voted for Trump.
- Second generation Latinos, whose many parents, and grand parents and other close family are illegal immigrants, were repeatedly warned of what would happen, and its one of the constitutions, that massively voted for Trump...
- Trump continued to state, as late as 2024,that the Central Park Five were responsible for the 1989 rape of a woman in the Central Park jogger case, despite the five males having been officially exonerated in 2002.
- Trump was a leading proponent of the debunked birther conspiracy theory falsely claiming president Barack Obama was not born in the United States
- Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination against African-American renters.
Donald Trump made big gains with Black voters in 2024.
- Trump is a convicted rapist and felon, and is known 44 million women voted for him...
We are past strange, and we are in the phase of electorate deserves what they voted for.
If you find yourself with a view of reality that massively differs from others, you have two options.
(1) Assume they’re irrational, uninformed, and wrong, or
(2) Reconsider your priors and attempt to understand why they think the way that they do.
Let’s take the “island of garbage”. It was said by a comedian during his set. The Trump campaign stated “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”.
The way that you framed it, however, was very careful to be true while also being misleading.
I think the viral quote "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." is probably pretty apt. The IRGC also has real support among the Iranian population. Putin clearly has strong support in Russia.
Generally, a lot of people are just not good people.
Sources for those quotes would be very helpful for anyone interested in this, because I’ve certainly never heard this before.
We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
> We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
I'm not American, I dislike Democrats and Republicans in the US, they're both horrible, just to preface this. Secondly, no other president has urged people to vote for them so people don't have to vote ever again, nor has any president threatened to put previous presidents in jail, nor has any president talked about wanting to skip the mid-terms.
I dislike politicians in general, but also, I'd be blind to not see when someone is extremely dangerous to democracy in general, beyond political affiliations. I'd say the same if it was Obama or who else, because as I said, I don't like any of them.
He hasn’t said what the parent said he did, and in the peer comment linking a video of him saying something similar, the context supplies quite a different meaning than was implied above.
From the a US perspective, EU hate each other and I see no way any temporary cohesiveness will last. Most EU countries are just as likely to elect a Trump in the next decade
I see how it may look like this from the outside. But I think it would be like saying that siblings hate each other because you witnessed an argument.
Most people in most EU countries consider the other EU countries as allies, even though they don't agree on everything. Now the fact that 27 countries argue means that they talk to each other. I think it's a lot less polarised than in the US. Or course there are extremes too.
The EU needs to be more vigilant than ever, though. Russia has been trying to export their nationalistic totalitarianism to the EU for decades and now the US has openly declared a goal of exporting their brand of blind ignorant nationalism to the EU as well. Both influences will boost alt-right parties if successful. The obvious intended outcome for both powers is a EU that is breaking up from the inside.
On the positive side, this shows that the EU has gained a level of international influence that is taken very seriously by other major powers. It's not 100% certain that it will survive this current wave of assaults, but if it does, it will be even stronger.
I have no idea how you'd measure it, but I suspect Republican states hate Democrat ones more than most European countries hate each other. Listen to the way they talk about California and New York.
What gave you the impression that EU members hate each other? It'd be a weird union if that was the case. Not saying it's not possible, I just haven't seen it myself, although I am a Swede so clearly I do hate the Danes and the Norrbaggar with passion, but it's love-hate, not hate-hate.
> leaders often favoring national interests to what would be best for the union
If we're talking about leaders for member states, then they're doing their job right :) They're not meant to figure out what's best for the union, we have separate elections for those people who go to EU and represent the country + care about the union. The national "leaders" of the country are quite expected to put national interests above what's best for the union :)
Because of the convoluted way the EU works, those national leaders can have outsized power and even veto some decisions (Hungary, anyone?). The parliament needs to have more power if we want to make the EU more democratic.
I don't think it's worse than Midwest vs the coasts or Republican vs Democrat.
In the us these groups have just stopped talking to each other. The only time that happens is over Thanksgiving and that's when it stops for some of those conversations.
At least in Europe the split is usually not within families...
Are you referring to the time when the world Cup is going on? In that case, absolutely. We all turn into monkeys climbing onto our own rock lol
I saw a lot of privacy focused reactions when they cut off Trump from social media before his term ended, while still in office. National sovereignty should always be a consideration, especially when it comes to anything related to essential infrastructure. Not every country is able to insource everything, or even a portion of everything... but every country should make an effort to ensure than there is at least some domestic production for everything that is reasonable related to essential infrastructure.
The US, China, Russia, EU (as a whole) and maybe Brazil are the countries in the best position to be able to do that more than most others just by their size and positions. And even that has limitations.
For example, IMO, the US should be manufacturing at least half of it's prescription medications domestically... it should also be producing a significant portion of it's communications devices domestically as well. We're too dependent on Taiwan and South Korea for technology currently.
I would encourage every nation to consider and take steps towards ensuring their own infrastructure... this does not mean isolation, just security footing.
Thats overly flattering, there have always been good arguments for having your data in the same country (if not the same building) A worse case hypothetical trump is really much worse than the real one.
On the other hand it is also lame to shift the blame on the US. A bit like Jim stole your car after you left the doors open, the key in the ignition and the engine running. Jim is a bad man.
Trump wasn't threatening to invade European countries and supporting Putin's position in an ongoing war in term 1. He has been far more outwardly anti-EU in term 2.
Out of curiosity how much of this is a manifestation of the utility of LLMs? I get the current political impetus right now but also the barrier for swapping out an infra stack was also much higher 2 years ago. From my own projects major swaps are now relatively trivial which means that vendor lock in is weak.
Given how bad the US military performed against Iran, its pretty clear that any hostilities started by the US against NATO, would finish with a takeover of Washington within...2 weeks...
Where does this weird expectation come from that you can basically achieve your goals in a 2 week air campaign?
If the US wanted to they could probably do a lot of damage but, as you can see in Ukraine, taking over a country is a whole different thing. Unless you're willing to go in with the army and are willing to lose a LOT of people. And even then it'll take months or years for a single country
Besides some companies that were deep into the weeds of AWS and been pushed to enable and use every single AWS service by their reps, I don't think it's much harder/easier today than it was two years ago.
Sure, LLMs help a bit with the actual typing, but the hard part is still planning, alignment and actual execution, all which are best done by humans talking and working with other humans.
I don't think we're in the days of "Hey Codex migrate our AWS stack 100% to Hetzner VPS stat" yet, without issues along the way. Wouldn't claim it's impossible either, but again the easy parts were already easy, and the hard parts are still hard.
Architecting to make portability easier should absolutely be a thing. But people in the weeds of a specific public cloud provider today will absolutely need to make tradeoffs between getting to a position where they can be more portable and devoting those resources to other things.
> Architecting to make portability easier should absolutely be a thing.
It is, but it's really hard to make the right trade-offs. Usually I'd start by basically making a list of what could potentially be done to make it easier, check lightly how hard each one of those will be, then sit down with stakeholders and figure out the balance between how fast they want to move, and how risky they want the migration to be. Some opts for less safeguards and moving sooner, others for absolutely less risk but it takes the time it takes.
Some. Many companies have relied in the past on the fact that doing things is freaking complicated. Such as maintaining your own services instead of using something from a provider like AWS.
What used to be a half year transition project that will be half-assed due to resource constraints, can now be properly done in a month by a skilled engineering team works on it with LLM leverage.
Of course, if America was still a trusted ally (like if Harris was president), we still wouldn't be doing it. Even if it was easy now.
Like NASA rockets don't have components whose manufacture is very carefully distributed over all US states just to keep the senators happy.
In any case, there are plenty of EU giants (ASML, SAP, Siemens, Alstom, Rheinmetall, etc) that are rather concentrated geographically speaking. EU fairness is more a government agency distribution thing, not for private companies.
You put your Headquarters in seattle, your data center in alabama, you have your dev team in SF... every state gets a slice
Like gov contracts and how they are divided is basically the largest conversation in defense contracts, they give more of a shit who will make the nails for a tank than the security parameters of the crew members
Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore. Oh well, I'm looking forward to closer connections and relationships to our French and Belgian brothers and sisters :)
> Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore.
That is a very myopic way of looking at it. Right-wing neoliberal parties were globalists and pro-EU for business reasons. Left-wing social-liberals were pro-EU for social and ideological reasons but were much more ambivalent about globalisation. Hard-right nationalists hate the EU but don’t see much of a problem with globalisation except when people are involved (exploiting them abroad, however, is fine as long as there is a buck to be made). If you’re a bit careful you’ll find opinions all over the place on both globalisation and the EU across the whole spectrum.
Globalisation is more something that affect individual member states than a EU issue.
An entire continent's sentiment shifting to pull market share away from your team is nothing to snark at, regardless of whether the first iteration works perfectly out of the box. I can guarantee you someone in Europe is smart enough to eventually get their needs sorted.
Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).
Being hosted in Canada is no longer the safety many assumed before. In reality it should not be an American company beholden to the current administration.
And that has never happened to any European company, right? (I'm looking at you ASML.) By your logic, does that mean that most European nations are "no longer the safety many assumed before"?
The example you mention is a tricky one, ASML is about as European as it is American. It is heavily subject to US export controls because its machines include US components, US software and US IP. They operate multiple R&D centers and factories in the US and employ a lot of US employees (~20%)
Let me generalise: Does your tech company use CPUs from Intel, AMD or Qualcomm, or NVidia GPUs or memory from SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron, or harddrives/SSDs from Western Digital, Hitachi, IBM, Toshiba, etc., or motherboards from (any Taiwan manuf.)? Or anything produced by Samsung or TSMC? If yes (1000% of tech companies), then you are potentially subject to the magic wand of US sanctions and soverign interference. To be clear, do not read that last paragraph as a support of this soverign interference, only an acknowledgement of it.
The first time I heard that the US was "requesting" (surely a gun-to-head moment) that the Dutch Gov't restrict ASML exports to China, personally, I was stunned. Sure, the Netherlands and US have incredibly strong political, economic, security, and historical bonds, but I never expected US to interfere so deep into the Netherlands. And yet, the Netherlands capitulated. (Please don't read this as a criticism of NL -- they are ultimately "Real Politik" due to their population size.) If NL can fall, then so can any other nation in Europe (or Northeast Asia: JP/KR/TW), except Belarus and Russia.
Not really, some of the IP is core to the product and it cannot function without it. In theory if you do something like come up with a complete replacement for EUV, you could, but everyone with deep pockets has already been trying to do that without success. Same goes for the supply chains, most companies (including ASML) don't manufacture everything themselves; so components that come out of the US would need non-US suppliers, which don't always exist.
I suppose it's a case of 'technically possible, realistically infeasible'.
A more likely scenario might be either a from-scratch not-as-good machine that you can source locally (supply-chain wise) or a novel finding (which is hard to predict if it will happen and if so, when).
Not just ASML, when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company, the leadership and decision making was mostly US-based and centered around US policies, even if the HQ was still technically in the NL, but because PE and most other major investors were all US Bay Area.
For example my manager had to reject a candidate from Iran, simply due to US policies, even if that wasn't against the EU policies, and would actually have been illegal discrimination in the EU where the position was opened, but this policy came from the US and was applied in an unwritten fashion in the EU.
The influence of the US on finance and tech is massively understated. Plenty of international EU tech companies whose business model doesn't revolve around catering to the EU market and sovereignty, will tailor their products and operations to comply with US regulations since that's where a lot of their customer base and money is made. Just read the last post of the CEO of Bird, you can disagree with him that he's a scumbag and he's full of shit, but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US. That's why Mistral has a large presence in SV and London. Continental EU just sucks for acquiring capital.
Even at the no-name Austrian startup I used to work before, the biggest investor was a US PE, since no German or Austrian investor wanted to invest more than 5 figures in the company, which was not enough to cover the payroll of the ML/data scientists. As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
> but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US
Worth specifying here you're talking about VC-infested SaaS, not just your run-of-the-mill bootstrapped SaaS. It's very much possible to run a SaaS in Europe and make money, as countless of people already do, which I'm sure you too are aware of, but probably way harder to raise similar amount of money as US companies, that I'd agree with.
Edit: Strange typo; s/infested/invested, but kind of makes sense like that too so I'll just leave it, Freudian slip or something.
> when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company
Ok, come on, please stop playing this silly HN game of: "another major ... company". There can only be four other options: NXP, SMM, BE Semi, Nexperia.
Or a bit deeper: SMART Photonics, EFFECT Photonics, Nearfield, Prodrive Tech, Neways Elec.
Which one?
> As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
Let me respond in the most offensive manner possible: Do you prefer the teat of US or China (or Russia!)? Pick your poison.
Yep, they grew quite well, though it was pretty toxic, just like a lot of small Austrian companies with PE as investors, lots of layoffs and people coming and going all the time, mismanagement, too much dependence on cheap foreign student visa labor, etc.
I spoke with some high level folks at a very profitable private company recently and inquired as to why they had DBAs on staff for what amounts to a pretty simple OLTP type system. Id naively assumed that someone of that scale would be using a cloud provider (RDS for AWS etc) thus negating the need for someone who really knows DB internals and upgrades and OS level stuff.
The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize.
I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country.
Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?
From our perspective I'm not sure the cloud abstraction is better or we even want it to be done like that locally. Look at S3 as an API for example. It's absolutely dire. I'd rather use NFS (!). And stuff like Lambda and Cloud Functions are just cat turds.
On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size and scale so we have to run on bare metal. That just makes it really fucking expensive colocation.
Lambda is awesome .. until you actually try to use it for realsies. Cat turd is an apt description. Just being able to get the damn logs for debugging is itself a hassle. Terraform helps a ton in all this and I rarely find myself using the AWS UI anymore. Still Lambda is a great idea that just doesn't deliver for any use case more than responding to some S3 upload action or Event Bridge operation.
Don't even get me started on the API Gateway sitting in front of a group of related Lambdas. Its OK once you get it setup and running but buildign/changing it amounts to stabbing yourself in the eyes.
I saw you post "lambda is awesome" and was going to reply with "only in certain circumstances." But you beat me to it.
After about a year of poking lambda to see how it actually worked (versus how it was documented) and building a cloud formation replacement (TF eventually did what I wanted, but not before I made a simple PROLOG based replacement for it). But I finally made it work after MUCH struggle.
So... +1.
I put this in our code several years ago: "WARNING: Do not look at Lambda stack with remaining eye."
Those local options exist, and have been around forever, but the problem is nobody is doing it without cutting corners and with pay-as-you-go elasticity (and the 'call an API, get a VM instantly' effects that go with it).
Most on-prem deployments were trash and a lot of them still are. Not because it couldn't be better but because it's easier to just have some random hypervisor department do this work manually and not do the work to create it as an internal product. Even VMware with vrealize failed and that's about as 'customisable cloud platform in a box' as COTS enterprise software can get.
Maybe it's because IaC and APIs were just not in the vocabulary of the average system integrator or on-prem operating team (it's still lots of clickops and copy-paste).
The "cloud" rose to prominence from a small period of tiem where Amazon had a lot of extra cloud capacity outside of Black Friday, etc, and linux networking issues that needed architecture to be a certain way.
Those linux networking issues have been long since solved, but the "cloud" was discovered to be incredibly profitable and sticky in the name of convenience and proliferated.
A lot of the "cloud" software is open source software that was packaged to have a web and api front end, and that service renamed to something specific to AWS, etc.
Yup, I've been seeing the same development pretty much everywhere. It's become a standard question in procurement processes in all EU-based organizations I've worked for (I'm a consultant).
I feel this and as a German company, we have our stuff hosted in the EU. But where it becomes pointless to have the host in the EU, is when Cloudflare is a requirement. Since we expose ourselfs through their certificate, we might as well host with a US company. And I’m not aware of a EU Cloudflare competitor with similar WAF offering.
this is good, there's money to be saved in many many cases with self hosting. Cloud was supposed to save money but it's gotten so overdone that now companies have dedicated devops teams just like they use to have dedicated sysadmin teams. I think you can take the opensource paas's out there and selfhost something internal that covers 75-70% of your use case at a fraction of the cost of aws/gcp/azure.
The price of hardware (DELL, HP), and the price of enterprise software (VMWare, Nutanix, etc.) has increased an insane amount in the last 12 months. In our case some of the services it has been as much as 6x. Hardware quotes are rising 10-20% per week. Delivery dates are months out.
It has become so bad that we're considering moving to the cloud for our on-premise workloads. Only problem is some of the cloud providers in the areas we operate from have run out of compute.
The fact that these "move off US infra" posts now routinely hit #1 on HN is itself pretty telling. Another example is the public outcry here in the Netherlands over selling off the company doing the infra for an important citizen-facing piece of government software (DigiD)...
i mean it makes so much sense, cause of the political instability. I recently was at a reception (because of the europe day) and there I talked to some officials that told me that even they don't really know how to to tackle the problems of nowadays. Basically every european state is trying to move its IT infrastructure from the US to Europe and i read somewhere in the news that Aldi is supposed to provide infrastructure to compete with AWS...
Loss of trust towards US is one factor; another is enshittification of services; yet another are good enough monopolies that EU don't have capital to disrupt
I'm willing to wager a bet the former reason is the bigger reason. Many of the data migrations I've helped with, been to services that owners know are slightly worse or doesn't have one feature they ideally should have had, but because of the first reason, it's more important to move now than to wait for it to be perfect. I don't think many are migrating because of "enshittification of services", I haven't heard that as a reason myself at least.
The USA is threatening war with the the EU and its allies. A loss of trust doesn't quite convey the seriousness of relationship destruction this causes and the monumental shift that is now happening.
Leaders are not conveying so much about the loss of trust, because they are saving face for the US to try to rescue what little can be rescued of the remaining relationship.
The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome. I recently was in a discussion about what kind of responsibility we can put on the residents of the US for this situation. A US lawyer answered "well the 25th amendment ties our hands, and we do a lot of protesting so no blame on us". The judgement on US citizens was pretty harsh.
You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
> The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the American public. I am interested in America's standing in the world. More than half of Americans do not support these lunatics. Unfortunately due to our inherently unfair electoral system which gives preference to money and land over voters, it requires about 60~70% of Americans voting against them consistently for at least a decade to overcome the lunatics. That's just a very high bar to clear.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
Open to suggestions. The only ideas I have for relinquishing control of the US from the billionaires back to the people would, rightly, get me banned from HN.
What's ironic to me in these discussions is how similar Ukraine was at one time to the current US administration (probably not by coincidence). Things change quickly.
>"Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban."
Well, EU and the rest of the world owes nothing to Ukraine, yet they have provided much help. Blind trust is stupid anyways. Especially between countries.
>"Trust is broken forever."
This sounds like a drama queen. Look at your own politicians first.
There is a way in which this whole situation has been revealing to me about how little some outside the US actually understand about US politics and civic structures, or alternatively have their own form of isolationism.
The heterogeneity in the US — culturally and in terms of political-legal structures — is far greater than those in Europe and Canada seem to understand sometimes. This is now combined with a corruption of democratic legal processes (e.g., gerrymandering) that make options outside of outright civil war a needle increasingly difficult to thread. There is a reason people are bringing up Hungary — it would be absurd to equate the EU with Hungary for the same reasons it's absurd to paint the entire US with a broad brush.
Something like 90% of people in the US opposed what was going on with Greenland. Just about the only people in favor of it in the US were the presidential administration and people trying to curry favor with it. What do you expect the other 90% to do? The legislators being petitioned were busy with a deluge of other immediate domestic problems — maybe people outside the US didn't understand the scope of the unaccountable fascist police occupation going on in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles? Protesters in Minneapolis were being murdered by these thugs. That's not even getting into the dismantling of social safety nets, rampant corruption, Venezuela, etc etc etc
People outside the US do not want a US civil war. It's happened before and if it happened again would happen along the same geopolitical lines as before. It would be devastating not just to the US but to the rest of the world.
Treating everyone in the US as the same, without recognizing the very real divisions involved, or the structural stresses involved, doesn't help anything.
Everything happening in the US could happen everywhere. If you have enough politicians distorting and destroying traditional democratic mechanisms in favor of a criminal fascist and party domination, people have fewer and fewer options left outside of things that no one wants.
"The complete disinterest in international allies" is a dishonest statement, and I can only assume reflects total ignorance of what is happening in the US, and/or a self-serving defense mechanism to avoid really confronting the difficulty of what those in the US are faced with.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
As an American, that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn (unless we're buying a tshirt or something) and have been for many presidential administrations. Why would Americans be interested at all in what allies have to say when it's always negative anyway? When someone tells you you're their enemy long enough you begin to believe them.
As for the discussion of moving tech stacks to Europe, if that's where your company is why did that not make obvious sense day 0? Why would you place your critical infrastructure in another country not beholden to your laws? If you're based in Europe then you should host in Europe, and even further, host in your country.
> that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn
457 British solders dead in Afghanistan supporting US operations beg to differ.
Mate, seriously, step away from the propaganda and pay attention to what is happening to your democracy. Then you might understand why your allies are losing trust.
It should be a matter of shame, not pride, to the British that they followed a jingoistic US into a needless war in Afghanistan which achieved nothing but much senseless death.
The 2003 protests against the war in Afghanistan were the biggest in UK history. Approximately 1 Million people (1 in 60 of the UK population) made their way to London to protest, and hundreds of thousands protested in other cities on the day.
What makes you say that wars are unnecessary? You don't get to see what would have happened in the absence of a war. Keeping some countries like Iran in check by restricting their arsenal, or weakening their economies and military capabilities seems absolutely necessary for world peace for example.
trust or not, US vs EU or somewhere else, you should be in charge of your data and your data should be subject to your laws and yours alone. It only makes sense.
As a European: yes definitely. And that won't be fixed if you choose a sane administration again. There can always be another Trump. It will take significant time to build trust again.
In some cases but not enough. Some of us has been doing a lot to help educate companies and business here and with the current administration - and the fact that they are being explicitly backed/funded by the Silicon Valley tech companies long resisted government overreach - have helped to finally open ears in boardrooms to the dangers of the Cloud Act and other leverage.
GDPR gave us "oh cool AWS has eu-west-1 and pretends to comply so we can also pretend to comply" but I think the tone has shifted to actually caring, at least a little bit. And with the CLOUD act all the US based hyperscalars can't really offer compliant hosting.
Trump is not the core issue since he isn't a hereditary monarchical dictator.
It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less.
No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.
Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems. The real enduring toxic legacy is the packing of SCOTUS, sold to voters as a means of overturning Roe V Wade but in fact a massive enabler for corruption and gerrymandering. Those guys are there until they die or Democrats grow a spine, probably the former.
>Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems.
Any democratically elected leader can cause huge problems during their mandate, not just Orban or Trump. You have to wait for elections or their term limit to kick them out peacefully.
The difference is whatever the person in the US president seat does, massively affects the whole world, not just the US, which is why we talk a lot more about the huge problems Trump caused rather than what problem the president of Romania, HUngary or Greece cause in their own countries.
The issue remains the voting population to not elect people like Orban or Trump at the next elections. The EU can cancel or sway elections in Romania or Hungary to make sure the right candidate wins, but it can't sway US elections in their favor.
I started the process of this back in January and now, at least in terms of product hosting; fully migrated into European infrastructure (https://bannermedia.ltd).
It didn't come without a bit of pain, but glad I've done it - and to come with this I've ended up building a whole terraform setup for cross provider / cross region high availability within Europe.
So far my key mappings included:
- Cloudflare -> Bunny CDN (and honestly I am so impressed with Bunny so far)
- AWS (or similar) -> Hetzner + OVH; I'm also looking at Civo.com for UK presence.
- GitHub -> Forgejo. I do actually still operate in GitHub for development only work, however Forgejo is mirrored within my European private network, and thats where deployment workflows happen.
- Google Analytics -> Self hosted Umami.
I'll be doing a writeup fairly soon on the entire process.
Waiting for your writeup, especially the Bunny part. We moved away from AWS but Cloudflare remains a point of failure, we are going to remove it as soon as we have some spare time to do the required research.
What are you looking for? I use Bunny CDN along with Bunny Shield, and together they're better than Cloudflare for me. It's $10/month, but I can afford it for the privacy of my users. Bunny's aggressive bot blocking without bothering the vast majority of users with regular challenge pages provides a much better UX.
Honestly my needs are not super complicated. There are a few edge rules I have in place to try and block things like the TikTok Bytespider which is hammering one of my sites.
It's able to support round-robin multi-endpoint DNS, including weightings you can update which is super useful for what I'm doing.
I've only really needed to speak to support twice so far; one was to get un-blocked because I migrated all my sites too quickly on a fresh account lol, so triggered their suspicious activity (so just be aware of that) - but both times they replied within an hour and resolved things.
While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways. For example, they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection'[1]
I think that's a very different kind of concern, and its also been very predictable and slow.
I would also say though, you have to be a bit careful about "they are discussing" because there are many people across different countries with different agendas, and a huge amount of discussion between people. Your link for example is a pretty good bit of background info, clearly saying VPNs aren't just about accessing porn
> In the corporate world, VPNs are essential for secure remote work, allowing employees to access company
systems without compromising sensitive information. For individual users, VPNs prevent tracking by
internet service providers, advertisers and potential cybercriminals. They are also used to access
educational or entertainment content that may be restricted in certain countries, including authoritarian
regimes, supporting freedom of information and digital inclusivity, as censorship becomes more difficult to
enforce through VPN use.
It links off to sites discussing possible approaches to age verification which highlights that various approaches in France didn't meet the regulators requirements because of a lack of privacy.
I think this is a different kind of concern about how your products must work compared to worrying that with little to no notice your country may be cut off due to a diplomatic spat from some specific service.
Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better. Lots of laws allow people to protect themselves from digital exploitation.
I agree that there is a ton of bullshit as well though. Gotta dox myself with imprints for example, so I cant share my work with people without also doxing myself. Also as a hobbyist you pretty much need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore. Also gotta make sure that data of European citizens never leaves Europe and and and... Lots of things to remember.
And before anyone asks, yes I know an imprint usually is only required for businesses, but nowadays pretty much everything could have business intent.
Well, as a German consumer, I gotta say it's pretty darn great to be able to pinpoint a website to an actual business. It's a good way to judge how legitimate an online shop is before ordering, for example; and if anything goes wrong, I know there is someone I can hold accountable.
As a hobbyist dev you don't need an imprint - unless you're selling software, at which point you're a business and your customers should be able to hold you accountable for it.
You need an imprint for pretty much everything, as I wrote earlier. Even a hobbyist Youtube channel requires one if you're strict with it. It's enough that said thing could have business intent and I want to emphasize the could here. To be completely sure, you'd have to check with a lawyer.
Is me writing a blog post about how much I personally like hamburgers a business? Because that can be interpreted as having business intent in Germany. As soon as I drop the name of a fast food restaurant, it can be interpreted as advertisement that I got paid for. Yes I could easily prove that this isn't the case if asked, but thats work.
Not so. German courts actually take a look at the site and apply common sense judgement. If it's obviously a personal blog, nobody is going to successfully litigate against you. There's a lot of FUD involved in these discussions.
I'd never heard of that imprint stuff but that's pretty Draconian yeah. If it will start being required for foreign sites I'll block all German IPs.
I avoid doing any business in Germany these days. I tried to get a VPS from Hetzner but they demanded a copy of my ID and didn't accept that I blanked out my citizen number. Which is actually recommended by our national police for identify theft risk.
I am from Canada and when renting from Hetzner was never asked about personal ID. Maybe because I started few years ago. Never knew about Scaleway. Looked at their website - prices for bare metal seem to be higher than in Hetzner
The ID checks are random. When I registered a while back I had to provide mine, so I aborted the registration. I tried again recently and was not asked for one.
True, I guess Germany has a lot of extra layers to all this. It's really not easy to actually publish anything without being in risk of some bored lawyer making your life hell.
> need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore
And this is a bad thing why exactly ?!?!?!
If you respect your users data and right to privacy then you've got nothing to hide by publishing an EU compliant privacy policy.
It might be "just a small app", but I and many other people still very much still "do give a damn" about what the hell you do with my data, where you store it, how long you store it and how I can exercise my GDPR rights.
Because if I want to provide an app to like 5 people I know personally, I am soon forced to do so via the Playstore due to Google disabling sideloading on Android.
So now I am forced to inform myself about all the bullshit documents I never cared for beforehand. Yes I know what I am allowed to do with my users data, no I don't send it to some data brokers, yes I already comply to privacy laws and whatnot. Just requiring some official document that you have to let a lawyer take a look at is beyond me.
Of course. But then again, it was the US that threatened the EU with military invasion, so if you want your service to continue uninterrupted, it helps being prepared.
Currently, if you want the internet-climate of the 1990s or even 2010s, you need to build yours, preferably on a different planet, with your own hardware.
We don't have any "ideal" places anymore.
And we need to defend what we support and believe.
Have you been around at that time? NSA had recording boxes at ISP routing places, every few days guy would come to swap hdds. Most com was unencrypted. Or read about echolon...
Yeah echelon seemed overwhelming at the time, and encryption was to be the answer.
But it turn out surveillance works just fine if you only focus on the meta data. Knowing who takes to whom, and which sites people visit is much more valuable (and much cheaper) than scanning the actual payload.
And why collect all that data yourself if ad companies are happy to sell it to you, ie to the government? (Huh, maybe that's why Facebook changed its name to Meta, come to think of it)
I was four when I was programming my Commodore 64.
I have seen "parallel [dial-up] modem banks" for "lawful interception", then specialized Ethernet cards for DPI, watched traffic analysis dashboard of a REDACTED country live, did DPI on powerful-enough systems myself for personal testing.
I have gone through USENET, flame wars, IRC; did my own MITM, etc. Always knew about echelon, how escrow based Encryption canceled last moment, etc. etc. etc.
At least, the barriers were higher then. These barriers required people to be considerate, well-targeted and selective. Now we don't have any of these. The overhead is almost non-existent for these things.
Doing dragnet operations were costly, and this allowed curious yet good-hearted people to understand the environment they lived in. Now, we're all blacklisted by default and whitelisted as long as we don't touch the wrong paving stone on the internet.
This is exactly right. The new internet is analogous to cable television, but of course so much worse in many ways. The outrage and addiction are far worse, there are brand new privacy constraints, and of course it's controlled by powerful business interests with much more time and resources to pump into the problem than you have to fight it.
The author isn't just moving their personal setup; they're also moving their business operations. It's not some slacktivism 'I don't like the US any more' issue; it's a 'how can I maintain my income now the US is firing all its glass cannon' issue.
Yeah except he made multiple exceptions and justified them with "OK well I guess these can stay because they're better than what's available in Europe." So it's not exactly "I have my values and I'm sticking with them no matter what."
The funny thing is that the EU will tout this move away from US clouds as one of their successes, even though they have done literally everything to cripple EU tech ecosystem.
If you/your company is already inside the EU, you can't really escape the EU's unpredictability, but you can to some extend reduce the blast radius of the American government's whims.
It's horrible everywhere. If you're in the EU go donate to: https://epicenter.works/ They're a citizen rights NGO working against all that BS in the EU (and in Austria, where they're from).
Utah has already implemented this. But yes this and Chatcontrol is very bad. The EU is not all good and we need to keep fighting such government overreach.
Also, the "open your app store to competitors" was just bullshit, eyewash, cop out. The apps on these "alternative app stores" still need to jump through all the hoops, pay apple development fees, get approved etc.
American company maliciously complying with the law, thinking they can get away with it? Never heard about such thing!
Jokes aside, the long arm of the law takes some time, it took us long time go get Apple to even allow alternative app stores. Eventually they'll get fined and actually start following the spirit of the regulations, but it'll take time as they try to drag it out as much as they can.
> they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection
Oh FFS!
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law. Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous).
This is how our democracies work!
Implying government discussions will be approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
Why do you think entirely different countries and states with entirely different politics across Europe Canada and America all pushing the same policy coincidentally within the space of 6 months has anything to do with democracy.
External influence and lobbyism is part of the democratic process for sure. Stable democracies have self-correcting mechanisms to defend against too much pressure from any side. There is no reason (yet) to doubt the effectiveness of the European Union's self-correcting mechanisms.
IMHO, you're both right: There is an active, covert political campaign for more online surveillance under the guise of child protection going on world-wide right now; so much is clear to anyone following the various attempts everywhere. Yet as of now, this campaign hasn't lead to actual, harmful legislation in the EU.
> Implying government discussions will be approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
Don't get too much up in your arms about it, any topic about Europe and EU on HN ends up with huge swaths of American commentators seemingly willfully misunderstanding or spreading FUD in these comment threads.
You'll get used to it eventually, so you can identify what's the real criticism and worthwhile discussions, vs the easy trolling attempts.
> they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection'
Just like with encryption, there will always be an idiot politician somewhere discussing banning it. Mr Google tells me, for example, that lawmakers in Michigan (US) recently proposed " Anticorruption of Public Morals Act" which contained VPN banning clauses.
Frankly, until such time as it actually NEARS, let alone BECOMES legislation, the only thing posts such as yours are doing is spreading FUD.
The clue is in the URL you post "thinktank". It not even EU parliament, let alone been through the parliament debates, let alone passed to votes, let alone passed to being implemented by member states .... its just a random idea someone wrote down.
And quite frankly, I would still much rather be in the EU's digital environment than that of the US.
Not only that but if you actually read the linked document it isn't calling for a VPN ban. It's a general report on what VPNs are and how they're perceived by various bodies. It does make reference to the UK Child Safety Commissioner's suggestion that they should be restricted to adult use only but it also talks about how essential they are for business etc. On the whole it's quite balanced and the existence of such a report seems very reasonable.
It's a result from the "European Parliamentary Research Service", hosted on the official website of the European parliament. And it is fully inline with recent attempted and success legislation of the same parliament. I am not sure why you would call this a "random idea" and an established member of the Parliamentary Research Service as "someone".
And if we go to the homepage for "European Parliamentary Research Service", we see:
EPRS’ mission is to provide Members of the European Parliament, and where appropriate parliamentary committees, with independent, objective and authoritative analysis of, and research on, policy issues relating to the European Union, in order to assist them in their parliamentary work.
So a Member of Parliament asked them to conduct this piece of RESEARCH, so what ? It may or may not ever see the light of day in parliament !
Across all publication types, the "European Parliamentary Research Service" published 1034 documents in 2025 and, 486 documents so far in 2026. And for this specific publication type ("At a glance"), they published 285 in 2025 and 113 so far this year.
How many of those hundreds of documents per year of RESEARCH actually make it all the way through to legislation I don't know .... but I think you'll find its a safe bet that its a fraction.
My understanding is that the research service is providing legislation with research to inform them on how to implement. What is your claim? That the parliamentary research service is just a bunch of people writing documents nobody cares about and if you look just long enough you will find for each of their results something that claims the opposite?
> My understanding is that the research service is providing legislation with research to inform them on how to implement
And do you think the research would be complete or honest if it didn't present criticisms and a comprehensive list of use cases for VPNs? It says so many positive things about VPNs and describes them as "essential" so it's really difficult to comprehend how anyone could spin it as somehow calling for a VPN ban.
>As the EU reviews cybersecurity and privacy legislation, VPN services may also come under stricter regulatory scrutiny. For instance, it is likely that the revised Cybersecurity Act will introduce child-safety criteria, potentially including measures to prevent the misuse of VPNs to bypass legal protections.
Again, I can't quite fathom how you're spinning that.
> "may also come under," "it is likely that," "potentially including."
And that's potentially including only " measures to prevent the misuse of VPNs to bypass legal protections" which is a very specific thing.
And it even comes as part of a report that also lists genuine uses of VPNs including secure remote work, protection from surveillance and circumventing authoritarian censorship.
> My understanding is that the research service is providing legislation with research to inform them on how to implement.
Dude, just go read the damn website.
The research service does not operate on its own volition. An MEP requests a piece of research to assist them in their parliamentary work because they require independent, objective and authoritative analysis of a topic.
Please stop with the damn conspiracy theories. Sheesh.
A random MEP asked for this research. The MEP may or may not ever table anything based on the research. Ergo, it may or may not ever progress into the parliamentary debate, let alone votes, let alone member state implementation.
I am not aware I was spreading conspiracy theories, and I do not understand why you have to be so aggressive and simultaneously defensive.
An independent, objective, and authoritative analysis requested by a MEP speculates that a restriction or ban on VPN is likely. I think this is valuable information. You are saying this is worth nothing until it actually gets up to a vote. I disagree, I see your point and maybe it's fine to panic only when it actually comes to a vote, but I prefer to know what to expect, and what the Research Service considers an "independent, objective, and authoritative analysis" on this topic.
> While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways.
It makes a lot more sense if you realize pretty much the sole motivation behind all this digital virtue signaling is "put my data somewhere Trump isn't."
Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"? There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
The political systems of the USA and the EU are extremely dissimilar. The US, by virtue of their "winner takes it all" mentality, is evidently pretty vulnerable to a mad leader single-handedly destroying decades of progress. Whereas the EU isn't a single entity, but a federation of 27 member states without central leadership. There is no "EU government", and thus no single corruptible entity that could turn "insane".
> Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"?
Where did you try to find this? And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here? There are a bunch of contingencies already in place for economic instability both for individual members states and EU-wide, there is "Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union" in case there is one rogue member, and then each member state has a bunch of their own contingencies already too.
What exactly is missing here?
> There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
I think you might severely misunderstand how decisions are made in EU, and also how regulations and such are actually implemented. I don't think there is any such assumptions at all, that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.
Where are you even getting these misconceptions from?
I think you misunderstood what I was talking about, or perhaps you're an example of it.
> And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here?
It means, "what if the EU starts acting belligerently to other countries like the US has?" Where, hypothetically, would someone move their data since now the US and EU are off the table?
And if your answer is "well, you see that would simply be impossible because <waves hands about EU policy making>", then I guess you're an example of someone believing that EU politics will forever remain sane.
> that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.
> It means, "what if the EU starts acting belligerently to other countries like the US has?" Where, hypothetically, would someone move their data since now the US and EU are off the table?
You mean if a EU member state does this? Then those contingencies I mentioned earlier will be used.
If you're a EU member and another EU member does that, you'd still have your data in EU, just not in that member state, if you had that.
> And if your answer is "well, you see that would simply be impossible because <waves hands about EU policy making>", then I guess you're an example of someone believing that EU politics will forever remain sane.
I've literally pointed you to concrete and very real contingencies that exists today, zero hand-waving.
> Same situation as the US...
I don't know how it works there, I just know that no one in the EU assumes everyone else will always agree with you, and if you look at how democracy works in EU and in the member states, I don't think anyone has those assumptions there either.
While the EU currently offers more privacy than the US, the best solution would be to use services which no one could have any meaningful control over, as much as possible, except the user.
Self-hosting (including object storage, backups, CDNs) is hard, but doable for some companies. For others it's life-and-death due to costs.
Analytics should be kept at a minimum and should always be self-hosted.
Email should die and be replaced with some E2EE solution. Matrix is far from perfect but if I were to make a website now, I would offer the choice of a Matrix address for account creation and comms. It's still federated and, while not offering 100% privacy, is much better than email, which offers none.
Using a service for transactional email is something that shouldn't be required in an ideal world. That it is only shows how email is captured by a few big players who simply won't deliver your message even if you follow the best practices when setting up your server.
Payment services shouldn't be required in an ideal world, either. They're needed because of a bunch of regulations and unnecessary complexities that could've been avoided and aren't needed from a technical POV.
AI use is troublesome when a company is not using their self-hosted models. As a customer, I wouldn't want my data being shared to a US company or an EU one, although if I had to choose, I'd say EU would be the lesser evil.
It is good to diversify but people should really not make Europe out to be some sanctuary. European governments (and thus companies) are still going to cooperate with America. When the day comes when they do not, America's reach will still be long.
Never mind the fact that incentives in Europe are not so different from the USA. It may look that way now, but often moving across the globe just means trading one villain for another.
Still a good idea, just a word of caution. If people make a move such as this based on some assumption about the stability of the European regulatory scheme you may want to examine that assumption with a little more rigor.
This. The privacy threats are somewhat different, but they still stem from government. The EU has tried to attack end-to-end encryption more than once, and they will try again. They are now requiring logging of IP addresses, and ever more tracking of use activities. The legislation requiring age verification is the camel's nose in the tent - expect them to require full ID soon. Etc.
All Western governments have clearly decided to restrict individual rights to privacy, political advocacy, and free speech in general. The way this is happening simultaneously in so many countries seems a clear indication of a coordinated effort.
For corporations this shift isn't about sanctuaries or ethical questions anyway, but about fear of running into EU road blocks placed for political reasons (maybe to penalize tariffs), long-term EU regulation enforcing data to stay in EU or even fear of retaliatory actions by US against EU economy.
European sanctuary is good for Europeans. The USA is not a reliable partner and has uncaused a massive amount of global instability that impacts European lives.
I also heavily disagree that incentives in EU are not different from the USA. The USA is an oligarchic government with pro-corporate politic parties. This is not the case in the EU. Not too mention workers in the EU often live better lives than workers in the USA.
Hard to not see how the incentives are completely unaligned. I mean FFS the USA made a very credible threat to invade Greenland, so credible that they were preparing for an invasion. An invasion started by your "ally."
However it seems odd to not follow your ending paragraph with more circumspection re the earlier ones.
If we stipulate that the USA is ending a trend of relative reliability and stability and as such constitutes more of a risk to Europe - including invasion of Greenland - why would we assume from this a stability in European regulatory regimes?
You don't think changes in the United States portend changes on the European continent? Do you imagine the USA descends into apocalypse while Europe remains unchanged? Will the incentives that push the American government to threaten "digital sovereignty" not loom in a Europe that has to increasingly face a more dangerous (given your own premises) world alone?
Yes, the current American administration is a disgrace. That is quite obvious and no achievement to point out, as you seem to well know. Don't let that automatically lead to the conclusion that Europe is some sanctuary. That does not logically follow. A relative improvement in conditions may end up being temporary. Caution is warranted. Especially from Americans who follow this "move my infra to Europe" trend without knowing Europe or its conditions with any intimacy.
As I said it's a good idea in principle. But some skepticism and caution is warranted.
Damn that is a very good point you make, thank you. I'm about to publish an app and had hosted the API on the .com domain, I'll flip that to the .nl domain
Matomo charges 22 euros for 50k hits/month.[0] Basically, it's unusable for anything other than a hobby site - especially with the number of crawlers nowadays.
If you self host for free, you're missing basically all of the good parts of web analytics such as funnel analysis as they lock all of those features being paid subs.
Sorry for the self-promotion, just wanted to mention that I'm actively working on https://vemetric.com and will soon provide a self-hosted version as well. Maybe it's interesting for some of you :)
I actually decided to self host analytics and generated a simple drop in google analytics replacement. People overthink these things. It's a very straightforward analytics API. And if you ingest the data in a good database or metrics engine (I used Elasticsearch), you can query it quite easily.
In my case, my motivation was that I want to use LLMs to query the data with agents. This whole thing was surprisingly easy to setup and a positive thing is that you don't have a scary extra data controller doing shady things with the data.
It's not bad but it's a massive resource hog for what it purports to do. Shame that most of the self host analytics use things like typescript or php rather than more performant languages like Go. Speaking of which:
Looks interesting but haven't delved in it too much. I do like how I can create specific analytic tracking events without worrying too much about ad blockers but that's hardly unique to Umami.
There's also another interesting analytics open source project whose name I am forgetting. It was written in C or something and was efficient enough to allow free usage or self hosted, it was a simple hit counter I believe.
Or, to plug-in my own solution, you can self-host UXWizz[0], pay once, get all features and also receive support/help with setup/self-hosting and long-term maintenance.
Analytics should be self hosted. For any serious business there should never be a reason to use a SaaS product. For SME (including startups) obviously yes. But if you have devops teams then deploy on your own hardware.
Yeah but you're missing the point. Nobody else has the worlds biggest search engine and ad network to allow them to do the same. Others have to charge.
I don't think Codeberg wants to be a GitHub alternative. In particular, I don't think they want to support the use cases of someone hosting a bunch of private repos, or someone hosting commercialized code.
I'll preface this with a statement that as a European I want European alternatives to succeed, and MS-owned GitHub to shrivel and disappear.
But in case anyone from Codeberg reads this, IMO landing and signup pages need a lot of improvements:
> Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting (using Forgejo)
OK, so do I register for Codeberg or Forgejo? Do I need to click through to Forgejo (it's a hyperlink)? Do I care it's Forgejo?
"Software development, but free!" Free is the biggest selling point? Well GitHub is free too. WHY should I sign up?
Why is there no signup email address on the homepage like GitHub?
Why is the Register CTA off to the side, looking like a header instead of a button?
Why no screenshots of the Codeberg (Forgejo?) UI / wowing me with features? (None on the Forgejo homepage either)
Why is the signup behind that Anubis anime girl AND I need to enter a CAPTCHA after passing that?
> Confirm Password
That's extra friction and AIUI an outdated UI practice.
> We are planning to drop the captcha by improving moderation and spam detection. (state: March 2025).
OK...it's been over a year.
> Using Codeberg to spread SEO spam, malware, links to IPTV services ("tvbox") or pirated content will result in an immediate ban with no prior warning.
Too many words, pushing the "Register" button even further down. Just put it in the Terms of Service
Just copy these things from GitHub, it's not that hard. Right now it looks like a conference registration landing page or something
Well this is nice. Apparently I reached some limits (thanks all), and had to pay Cloudflare more. Fair I guess, although some warning would've been nice. Tried multiple payment options multiple times just now and Cloudflare botched every time without giving me an error message. Finally managed to get it through on the 10th time. Please be gentle now :/
That sucks... Bunny CDN served me and others great when it comes to a Cloudflare alternative, if you're looking for an alternative.
I understand the pragmatism with going with CF, but I'd lie if I didn't also say using CF as the front for your entire "European Digital Stack" kind of makes the blog-post feel less authentic compared to my initial impression, because of that.
Oh that's "funny". Where I work we used to pay for cloudflare, then the credit card expired and we didn't notice in time (our bad, for sure), now our account still works fine, just no premium features and all tickets we've made in order to _resume paying them_ have gone unanswered. Big shrug
I want point out the other aspect of that decision to use cloudflare because the content is already public.
If your users are in a sanctioned region or a sanctioned entity it is entirely possible for cloudflare to deny serving them traffic. In a way your website users are still bound to the US policies even if you or your country doesnt approve of those sanctions.
fwiw I've had my site on front page hn a couple of times. It is a completely unoptimized hetzner server running nginx and serving HTML.
computers are _fast_ these days, you're more likely to have an outage from cloudflare than by just skipping it IMO (for basic personal sites, like yours seems to be)
I think it's more likely they just use/abuse it than specifically created it, same as things like google spyware. The NSA's desires and the ad industry are aligned, so its a match made in heaven.
Have to wait for the next Snowden before you get any citations.
NSA collaborator or not, the mere existence of something like Cloudflare, which also tries to nudge you into skipping internal http/tls and just use that at the front, makes it highly likely that NSA is already deep in their infrastructure, just like they've been in the past for literally any big technology company in the US.
But yeah, zero citations, zero evidence, just based on history and what the goal of the organization is, it's pretty clear what's going on already.
This is just categorically different and epistemically dishonest. It is, frankly, an embarrassing attempt to defend the fact that you don't actually have any evidence to support the claim that Cloudflare is supposedly an NSA creation beyond "believe me bro, ever heard of PRISM?"
Just a nitpick: 1Password is Canadian (still not European, but not us based, if that’s the issue). I do understand the choice to move all into proton though.
Canadian here. It pains me to say that my country will not keep your data safe from prying eyes, nor safe from sharing and cooperating with USA authorities.
Our legislative trajectory includes mandatory encryption back doors, warrantless access to data, and data retention even when you think you have deleted your data from a provider. Our federal government is only slightly behind the pace of the USA and is cooperating and sharing with them.
Well thanks but it’s the worst of both worlds, neither the European regulations nor US laws, many bills passed recently where law enforcement can tap into any data, so I would not trust that either. Also, highly likely they use US infra like clouds/etc so back to square one.
Hey, thanks for reading and it's great to read your interesting discussions.
Couple of things.
The main reason to move my data to the EU is that I live in the EU and I don't want a few non-EU companies in an unstable political climate have control over it. It's too unpredictable and I rather support companies closer to my jurisdiction.
I know the EU isn't perfect. And my stack is not 100% EU at the moment. I'm a pragmatist and just got down and transitioned the bulk of my services. Always room for improvement.
Some good points: my domain is owned by the US. That's true, but no way around it I guess (I do own the .nl too though).
I should dive deeper into using something else than GitHub / GitLab. Indeed maybe Codeberg / Forgejo.
And Cloudflare proved not to be ideal today (thanks for the hug of death). I still think using Cloudflare is a problem data-wise, because it only handles public data, but I might look at BunnyCDN again to see if they have better limits.
I like the idea, but I always struggle with the practical side of this.
As a business owner, I don't really care where the company is based on paper if the product is worse, the support is worse, or the ecosystem around it is tiny.
I want better European alternatives, but they need to win on product too.
"Not American" is a decent reason to try something. It is not enough of a reason to keep using it for years.
First time I heard about Mistral, so I went to the site. I first thought their logo is a pixel-art letter M. Then I read that their chatbot/agent is called "Le Chat"... wait a minute, that means something different in French? And then I noticed that the logo can also be seen as a cat head (from the whiskers up). Then I scrolled to the end of the page and saw my suspicion confirmed: https://cms.mistral.ai/assets/920e56ee-25c5-439d-bd31-fbdf5c... . Kudos to the designer(s)!
Got a similar stack for my personal stuff, but would probably do the same if I was freelancing and whatnot.
Bunny, UpCloud/Scaleway, Proton, Mistral, self-hosted Gitlab, self-hosted Plausible, had no idea about BugSink so amazing, now I know... and I deploy everything via some form of self-hosted Heroku
Very nice to see this more and more. Recently the German province of Schleswig-Holstei also moved almost their complete stack to European alternatives.
One note: for European payment coverage there is Rootline available. But I have to put up the disclaimer that I work at Rootline.
As a fellow European who's also working on a similar move, I would just like to note that it is absolutely surreal that we have to consider this.
I wish it was motivated by pure patriotism (give our money to relatively local businesses), but it's motivated by uncertainty, something I wouldn't have expected from the USA in my younger years.
Matomo is nice on low traffic, but when we have a sustained rate of 5-25 logins per second and above things become real slow. Using regexps is really bad when you start having problems, but they are fine on low traffic sites.
So If like it but it is a headache on high traffic sites. If anyone have an easy solution I would gladly accept it.
I have worked with two clients. Both north of 8 million visits a month. Both on matomo. Both self hosted.
If you architect the underlying infra right it still works like a charm. But I admit people need to know what they are doing. I was quite impressed with both infra teams.
But as always, if you do not want tu use auto scaling US cloud based services, you need to enasure you have the right scaling and the necessary technical expertise at hand.
I had no problems either, until we hit peaks. We hit our problems at about 7 million unique logins per month, we do not track visits in the same way. I am not that invested in Matomo and it just costs time for me.
I am not sure how you scale Matomo we could not vertically scale anymore, we never did MySQL clusters because it just was not cost efficient for internal reasons.
Managed a fairly large matomo site in the past. Using queue plugin (https://plugins.matomo.org/QueuedTracking) with Redis Cluster really improves the situation. We actually built a custom plugin with Nginx + Lua to avoid PHP altogether for the tracking part. Scaling ingestion then wasn't the problem, draining the queue was
The tracking was not the issue the problem was report generation with segments. Every segment makes you regenerate all the reports. Tracking part is a problem because you need to split the tracking and report part of you want to have something robust.
I am in the US but my daily chat AI is Proton's Lumo+. Adequate, good features, not too expensive. I am near the end of a 1 month experiment using Google's $250/month Ultra AI plan and I wanted to try something different when the Ultra plan ends. I have tried Mistral's Vibe command line coding agent and considered it, but decided on a one month OpenCode + Deepseek v4 experiment.
I understand why Europeans might want to go all in on their own tech stacks, but it might be more strategic to just not get locked in to specific providers. Maybe a mix of European, US, and Asian tech - with a good plan for easy migration.
Cloudflare is a kinda funny choice to pick to trust, and maybe they'll re-evaluate that soon.
GitLab is overall nice, and I recommended their on-prem product a few years ago, at an AI hardware tech startup with unusual security requirements. Today, I'd still consider GitLab, but I'd first evaluate how Forgejo fits requirements.
I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get a loads of downvotes for this comments, but what is the whole point of this? Let's say in next general election in Germany, AfD would come into power, form a government and Germany decided to break away from EU, and when that destabilizes EU, are you going to move all your stuff back to US?
I’ve also moved all mine to Europe. There are ample alternatives to us-based commercial cloud.
The regulatory environment is different, so it’s worth understanding the ramifications as far as what’s expected of you if you’re operating in a different jurisdiction. It’s nothing that can’t be handled, but some may find they have to care about things they haven’t before
It’s a great exercise for shoring up independence from extractive providers
Maybe I should have AI write up an article too. Honestly, it’s not just rare, it quietly matters
That lettermint service looks interesting! I was recently looking for something in that price range that covers both transactional and broadcast emails but couldn't find anything in Europe so I settled on Postmark which has been good, this looks almost identical in features and pricing though.
Same here. I just discovered this and put it in my "check out tonight" folder. I am currently happy using resend. But this looks interesting, especially also for my freelance clients with a focus on EU tech.
A pragmatic article, always nice. I was surprised that gitlab and github was stillton the list. For me moving to self hosted forgejo was one of the easiest transition i had. But i did not have complex CI/CD needs
"GMail lets you write filters against virtually anything"
GMail inexplicably doesn't let you filter against almost anything in the headers, except the few fields they hand-pick. Which is unfortunate because virtually every piece of political junk spam from one major US party has the same thing in its headers, and I can't filter on it. Presumably the other major US party has similar large vendors but I don't happen to get spam from them at this time.
To be honest I implemented Lettermint before I migrated to Scaleway, so I didn't even look at TEM. At that point I was more than happy though. And I like to support my fellow Dutch startups too.
Every now and then I see similar posts and people move to Proton from Gmail, because it is European. Well, it’s fine if that‘s the only reason you switch, but if you switch because US became weird and lost your trust, you might want to check their CEO‘s comments on political issues.
While Andy Yen supports specific Trump-aligned initiatives for precise goals, such as breaking up Big Tech monopolies (which, btw, Trump won't), this does not mean he will replicate the erratic nature and global loss of trust associated with Trump and his administration.
The Cloud Act is real and transcends any single company. This global erosion of trust highlights deeper concerns: specifically, that US practices have always been coercive. Now, the world is learning and taking action.
All my customers are in US and Canada, so switching to EU will automatically add latency to everything. That's a deal breaker for me, so I end up hosting on DO TOR cloud. At least it's not hosted in US but it is by a US company.
The biggest issue, is that the whole stack keeps being dependent on external nations, as per the companies that actually contribute to FOSS with big money.
Then it is Go (Google), Java (Oracle, IBM, Red-Hat), .NET (Microsoft), Rust (Amazon, Microsoft, Google), Typescript (Microsoft), C and C++ (Red-Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Apple Google, ...), and so on.
Attack vectors and supply chain, every piece of the puzzle matters.
There is no accident that folks like Oxide go through the trouble to control the whole stack, hardware, software, programming language toolchains they are using, only working with vendors that provide them every single documentation and customisation points they need.
This might be too naively non-feature-parity, but in case someone is looking for a European alternative to Notion/Google Docs, we made https://kraa.io/about
I switched to Protonmail a month ago. It is patently inferior to gmail. Every day I get annoyed by some weakness in the UI that google had apparently just always solved without me ever having to think about it. For example, reading long email chains in the proton UI is horrific. I don't know what google did that made it natural to read and proton does so badly, but it is painful to read these long chains of emails. Another example is log emails from my servers are getting grouped together by Proton. Gmail had sepearated the logs into separate emails in a very natural way. These small annoyances add up and I'm not having a fun time right now with proton.
This is actually a pretty interesting observation as GMail, when it first came out, was just as clunky as all the other webmail clients. At the time, everyone was used to Yahoo!, MSN, etc. and Google was the odd one out with their webmail client.
This changed when they were the first folks out there to get a dynamic interface in the browser (some of you may fondly or not so fondly remember the days of DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, and the like). Fast forward 10 or 15 years and now GMail is the standard by which everything else is measured.
I'm sure there are some things that are objectively better, but a surprising amount of preference comes from familiarity.
It can be done with proton, or at least it used to be possible (Not sure, didn't check in a while) thanks to their bridge. A small local software you'd run that decrypt everything and provides a local imap server with the decrypted content
Do you know if it's possible to cap expenses on Scaleway so you don't end up with unexpected charges (due to bandwidth or whatever)? I mean, having your services stopped until the next cycle begins or you decide to pay more. I knew this wasn't possible for Hetzner, for example, but I'm not sure about this one.
Seems like not being compatible with Sentry's agent is a missed opportunity for Appsignal, which I think is the premier EU based (Amsterdam) APM suite at the moment. It sounds like Bugsink is rather barebones in comparison and I bet a quick agentic coding session would make short work of a migration to AppSignal.
Heh, ironic that the link is now "temporarily rate limited" my cloudflare. I can't read the article, but it looks like he did not move everything to europe ;-)
Showed Cloudflare error page "Please check back later - Error 1027" for me for a while, DNS still pointing there... So probably not so European after all!
Not a stupid question at all. Hetzner's cheapest cloud server is €4/month, which includes 20TB of egress. Certainly not free, but should be cheap enough for most.
I do use a lot of EU services. But help me understand what is the hype about moving to EU cloud services? Is it any different? Wasn't internet supposed to break the international borders and bring us together?
A sympathize, but my EU biz bets on US tech. We are in a tricky position now. So every 'Look ma I moved away from US big tech' post triggers me. Details: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/us-against-them
Yeah trying to move more stuff out of the US too, while simultaneously trying to pick things that don’t follow the stupid unlimited scaling of how much money we can pull out of your wallet model. Two birds with one stone.
There are definitely technical gaps though. eg bunny still uses one unified api key. CF I can lock to an IP and set granular permissions
Huh! Interesting to see another one of these. I helped get GlitchTip off the ground awhile back. Might be worth evaluating as another self-hosted, drop-in Sentry replacement.
Meanwhile, we here in Europe move our stacks over to other continents or at least ourside of the EU to workaround the crazy EU regulation nonsense ;)
We live in crazy times my friends...
I have several small SaaS apps running on Rended and Railway. I would like to host them in EU. Wondering if there are similar "managed" PaaS options here. I found none.
I wonder if the author considered moving payment processing to Adyen from Stripe? They're also EU-based and a bit more... well known? I liked integrating with them in the past.
Irish here, it was never EU or Irish. The Collisons are Irish but Stripe is an American company. The profits are ultimately repatriated to the United States.
One of my friends made fremforge.com (an EU-sovereign CI/CD with Git included). It's currently in closed beta but goes live next week (tm). It is built upon Forgejo and EU-based services using T-Cloud as the underlying hyperscaler. Have a look! I don't make any money from it, by the way. And yes, it will cost a little bit, but rest assured: because you are paying for it, you will not be the product.
Proton Mail not supporting filters for message bodies is brutal, I understand why they don't do it but that really lowers its usability for me. Bummer.
Since you are already in the migration process, should’ve migrated to self hosting instead, full independence and control, Europe isn’t that different from US, they just have few extra steps on how to handle your data. Self hosting is literally a weekend project once you have bought the equipment (or just use an old pc with hdds), and they are not expensive either, and you can even host stuff for your friends and family too. Maintenance is minimal as well, you can automate few cron jobs in proxmox and enable backups (plus 3 2 1 rule). Your data is in front of you, all yours, you don’t need permission to delete or access that, you don’t need to become a lawyer and read terms and laws, you don’t to call support for whatever either.
Sorry to bring it to you folks, but this is not how you build a competitive industry. You put properly though-through legislation in place if you want EU to be competitive with US and China. Not regulations, for f sake.
Honestly not everyone wants and needs a EU that can go head to head with the US and China. The markets there follow different philosophies: one is the wild west of free markets to the extreme and the other fully centralised.
I personally want a sane, stable and consumer-friendly market, no unicorns but strong consumer laws and enforcement against mispractice of businesses towards people and the environment. We are far from it but I think the EU is the closest to an entity acting like that and being predictable.
The US chases the dollars at all costs and China similar but depending on the party lines of the decade.
I tried scaleway about 7 or 8 years ago and it was still pretty rough. And setting up with them required multiple trips to government portals to get id documents they would accept. Being European, they don't know how to scan the bar code on the back of US driver's licenses. It was a major PITA getting them to understand that people will sometimes change their names after they get married (my passport and birth certificate have different names and I had to dhl them a notarized copy of my name change order.)
So... Digital sovereignty is cool and all, but Scaleway is taking "Know Your Customer" seriously.
Unless you're implying that Verisign isn't a US company, just because .com has become the conventional domain for businesses worldwide doesn't change the fact that it's US-based. Similarly, the EU's widespread adoption of Microsoft Office doesn't make it any less American.
It's a bit like .gov and .edu; technically exclusive to the US. The difference is that .com and .org were opened up for anyone to purchase.
And it goes deeper than just intent: .com was literally administered under a US government contract for decades, with Verisign only ending up in control because they acquired the company that held that government contract.
So while anyone can buy a .com today, the infrastructure and oversight have always been firmly American.
I am not running a company, just a household but this article speaks to me. I have given this topic plenty of thought in the past year as I have a growing unease with large American tech firms and how they use data. These are some of my setups (in the spirit of the article)
I have also rid myself of Google Analytics for a personal website. Replaced with a local solution that parses logs and builds reports that give me quite a bit of information. Its a more ethical type of analytics leaving no cookies behind and no trackers at all. All info is from the web server logs, you can grok quite a bit of insight from this alone.
Email is the biggest challenge, I have mapped out the entire migration steps for Google Workspace to Proton but have not yet pulled the trigger. The main thing is coordination with the rest of my family who use the domain for their email as well, they don't share my obsession with "digital sovereignty" so there is some negotiation around time tables :-) The Proton family plan will cut the bill in about half.
Password management --> KeepassXC with db on local nas. For personal use I feel you can't beat self hosted for password management.
Compute, Digital Ocean I continue to use and has servers in Toronto which works for me geographically. It's very low down my list of migration plans, they just work and they have treated me pretty good over the years.
Storage all self hosted (ownCloud and Openmediavault). Are they the best options, maybe not but they just work. No cloud based storage at all (Google/Apple etc etc). If I ever throw something out there it is gpg encrypted).
Offsite backups, two local copies to seperate drives (dejadup) on my NAS and offsite storage.
There are still some other services I need to consider. I do have Claude Pro. I run local LLM's for a lot of stuff with OpenwebUI but its not a full replacement.
CDN - Also use Cloudflare free tier. Have to give it more thought, it just works so well.
DNS is fully self hosted using dns-crypt-proxy / dnssec to Quad9 and Mullvad DNS. Works great. I actually blackhole any hits to google dns at the router, media and iot devices love to ignore your dns settings.
Github for code hosting. I know, Microsoft, but it works and is not a hill I am willing to die on just yet.
Photos self hosted with Immich on Proxmox. It's been pretty solid.
VPN, Wireguard to the home and have also integrated Tailscale for some things, which has been handy for extending connectivity and supporting my dad in a different city. Apparently they are based in Canada so that is a bonus. I use the free tier for now but am considering the paid version just to support them.
Router and wireless access points all on the latest Openwrt with consumer grade equipment, some of which I picked up used for like 20 bucks. Allows me to have home, guest, media and iot vlans for proper network segregation. Is it overkill? 10 years ago maybe but today I would not run any other way.
When reading the docs of quite a few payment processors (for a simple cart check out) Mollie was quite hilarious. I kept thinking "this is it? This is all I need to do??" Then the masochist api's are also available.
And a serious lack of "dear customer, we are keeping all of your money for reasons we wont get into, screw you and your customers, you have no further questions." Which I consider a killer feature.
When AI is used to generate one picture, like in TFA, it's acceptable if the picture is nice enough. YMMV but although I'm usually not a fan of the AI-generated pics used to illustrate everything now, I dig the AI-generated picture in TFA.
Why are there exceptions for Anthropic, GitHub and GitLab?
> Anthropic is a US company...But it satisfies something else, the sense that the organization building the thing has given serious thought to what it’s building and why.
This reads like a weak excuse. Mistral and Mistral Vibe exists and even if you don't like them, there are many non-US harnesses (Qwen code) that are available.
> GitHub stays in the picture for one specific purpose: public-facing NPM packages and issue tracking for open source software.
First of all Codeberg exists.
Secondly, at this stage relying on NPM and the Java/Typescript ecosystem is quite frankly waiting for a disaster to happen.
This post isn't absolute on moving their digital stack to Europe as it has not one but three exceptions too many.
> The OVHcloud control panel is a labyrinth: the lifecycle rule configuration is buried somewhere in the documentation, and it involves some work in the terminal.
Use OpenTofu/Terraform! Much better than messing with cloud consoles, and then your infrastructure self-documents.
I’d also put out one note to any people outside the EU looking to switch to Mistral or really any service: just because they’re a European company doesn’t mean they’ll follow the GDPR if you don’t live there. Mistral is an example: in their privacy policy, they state that they follow whatever privacy laws exist in your country.
> they state that they follow whatever privacy laws exist in your country
Well, that's kinda obvious - if they want to do business in a country, they have to follow the laws of that country. That doesn't in and of itself mean that they will apply weaker privacy protections if the local laws are less strict than GDPR...
While I do think the link highlights are pretty neat, this particular cursor hijack annoys me greatly. Would be nicer to float the link highlights next to the standard cursor.
They had a datacenter burn down (in large part because it was fully built using wood) and lost all customer data and did not take any action for 6 months after the incident.
While the incident did happen, a lot of actions were taken and most of the data was recovered.
OVH now also keeps backups even for clients that don't pay for it.
I was hit by that datacenter catastrophe and got my data back almost immediately, in a new VM.
I've been using them for years with little issue (no more than happened on my AWS or Azure accounts, I would say less because it's less of a mess in general).
I was hit by the fire outage too, and the response was... mixed. I was able to start a new VPS in different region the same day and reconfigure everything, but data on the old instance has been lost. They also kept double-billing me for 3 months without me realizing, support had to step in to delete the instance that wasn't showing in admin panel, but kept generating costs. No refund suggested. I ignored it, since it was like $15 overcharge. Also months later the "deleted" instance reappeared and I had to kill it again. Strange stuff.
Aside of that exceptional case - overall they are pretty great and cheap.
It's fine to have an unstable backup system, as long as any failures in your backups are uncorrelated with failures in your primary system. And a random datacentre burning down probably isn't correlated with anything else, unless you're foolish enough to host your primary and backup copies in the same building.
All else equal, a more stable backup is of course better, but any backup is better than no backups, so choosing the cheapest possible option is often the best strategy since that's the one that you're the most likely to keep using long-term.
I've been dabbling with OVH and it feels very pricey and fragile. Has a very lipstick on a pig approach to whatever they used to be doing before piling into cloud.
> We are patriotic Americans. We have done everything we have done for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting U.S. national security... We believe in defeating our autocratic adversaries. We believe in defending America.
and
> So, you know, Anthropic actually has been the most lean forward of all the AI companies in working with the U.S. government and working with the U.S. military. We were the first company to, you know, put our models on the classified cloud.
> We were the first company to make custom models for national security purposes. We're deployed across the intelligence community and military for applications like cyber, you know, combat support operations, various things like this. And, you know, the reason we've done this is, you know, I-- I believe that we have to defend our country.
and
> And so we have said to the Department of War that we are okay with all use cases, basically 98% or 99% of the use cases they want to do, except for two that we're concerned about.
Never before in history has a vassal that is this dependent on its patron hated its patron so much.
God help us when the US finally decides that the vast amounts of money it pours down the drain to keep us as its vassal is not worth the squeeze. China and Russia will not be nearly as patient and kind.
America sends a VP to give a speech, which even though it made some politicians cry, was still just words. China will just use us for spare body parts and Russia will drop our people from planes.
America says it really would like Greenland, which it could take with literally zero contest if it wanted, and which it gave back to Europe after Europe had another one if it's many internal meat grinder wars. China and Russia just takes what it wants, they don't ask.
It's really going to suck balls being the punching bag of Russia and China.
Europe is by actual fact completely dysfunctional, constantly getting itself into shit left and right, constantly needing bailouts from America to keep it afloat, and Europeans pretend they are better than Americans. Totally absurd.
> Digital sovereignty sounds like a buzzword until you think
Sure now just think and give me the reason. All these moving to Europe post is getting tiring. Amazon follows the same EU rules, if not more, than Scaleway.
Matt Lakeman writes in one of his blogs that wherever he goes, people tend to love the USA. Except in Europe where he faces a constant storm of criticism. And that was before February. Just like you cannot explain the taste of chocolate to someone, it is hardly possible to explain the mental shift that happened everywhere when the US threatened the EU with military invasion. Like a broken egg this is diplomatic damage that cannot be repaired.
If you sell software and you tell your customers and prospects that everything runs in Europe, by European companies, this instills an enormous amount of trust. Risk averse sectors like manufacturing love this, and it will help you gain customers immediately.
So no, these posts are not tiring to many of us. In fact, we are only at the beginning of the beginning because many of us will be making these migrations. I wish things had run a different course.
So you are saying the reason that it is just perceived better?
Even that's quite debatable as I worked in few European companies and has never faced any backlash for choosing US vendor. Biggest European tech companies like Mistral and Klarna use many US vendors like AWS.
Yes. It is both a little funny, and true. Often departments don't even want to start a software project if it is being perceived as "legal and IT are going to have all kinds of opinions on this". When we say everything runs in Europe, by European companies, it actually signals "there will be no problem with GDPR and data sensitivity, and your legal and IT departments won't complain, and the CEO will love it".
Those legal and IT departments of companies favours Microsoft and Amazon, as they are sure they won't get any issue with regulation, or if they do they are the ones who can have better legal representation than a small open source self hosted software.
There is just no reason to believe European companies are any better in data privacy. I signed up for Hetzner once and they asked for my passport. Any American company doing that would be bashed so hard here.
Want to state up-front, I am a dual citizen: an EU member and the US, and I live in the US. So I hope this gives my view some credibility as being grounded in the dual perspective.
The sentiment we're seeing in this story/comments and thematically is EU's desire to distance from the US - sure in infrastructure - but more so in identity. Which on the high-level I think is a great goal (ie, Europe should have European identity) but is incredibly risky and I am not sure is well thought out, though I could be wrong.
We can say that since 1950s the US and Europe had a familial relationship with the US being a bit of the parent despite being younger. That manifested in everything from protection (US bases in Europe, NATO), money flow, and culture flow. Since the 1950s, America did not become more European but Europe became more American.
Today we're in the adolescent stage of this familial relationship - Europe wants to move out of the house and perhaps even pay for its own cell-phone plan and that could be wonderful because if that leads to a legitimately stronger and more robust Europe, that's great.
But there's risk. Sometimes when the adolescent moves out of the house, they blossom into the fully manifested version of themselves. Other times they fall in with a bad crowd or fail to deal with their internal problems - and whither. It's easy to tell daddy-US to fuck off, it's much harder to not slide into the clutches of Russia and China in the next decade or two, or to deal with the internal demographic crisis.
What worries me for Europe is that it is trying to "distance" more than its trying to "grow." I don't hear people talk about a Europe that's strong, that leads, that innovates - in other words, the motivation is still about the US (just in a negative sense) not about Europe itself and that's not a good sign.
I still don't sense a true vibe of resurgence coming out of my native continent. Difficult problems you've always had tend to come to a head once you actually move out of your parents house. And while it's great (or at least cute) that you can switch to a European e-mail provider that's very far from what it actually takes to survive and thrive as a country in the long run. Hope it pans out.
You might be right but you are missing a lot of nuance here. For instance, yes, Italy is not thinking about growth, true. But Poland? Poland is all about growth, they just made the list of the richest 20 countries in the world.
The real problem here is that EU as an economic block is much less integrated than people think. Pensions? Not integrated. Health insurance? Partially integrated. Exit taxes? A complete mess. Languages? Try speaking English or German or French in Spain. Etc.
EU has demonstrated that you can have local identities (I feel more Neapolitan than "Italian", for instance) and one economic block. Unfortunately, the economic block integration is not as deep as you might expect.
For the past days I've been participating(albeit over Teams) in a conference relevant to my industry (intel), basically startups and established companies showcasing their products to a closed audience of EU gov. officials.
One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this.
Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount of migrations I've helped moving data from US to EU already is higher this calendar year than all the other years of my career.
>I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before
Its not about public opinion, but rather data sovereignty requirements. Certain types of data must be processed within servers located in the EU, regardless of where the company's HQ is. That's why you see most SaaS platforms nowadays offer a EU-only version.
It is definitely also about public opinion and it is going to be translated into laws soon enough (i.e. governments mandate data sovereignty).
Recent erratic policies are having a profound effect on perception of US companies.
It has been brewing for a while.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/27/is-overreliance-on-...
>it is going to be translated into laws soon enough (i.e. governments mandate data sovereignty)
The laws are already there. That's my point.
His point is that those laws were basically ignored, until now.
The conversation started all the way back, with the Patriot Act, but until now the dynamic was roughly: politicians write lofty laws that pay lip service to data sovereignty, then add enough loopholes so that nothing has to change in practice, and nobody really cares.
Now people do care, and they don't want to use those loopholes. It's pretty obvious why things have changed.
There are no laws that force companies to store all (generic) data in Europe. If there were then the companies asking about migrations just now would already be in breach.
You’re probably thinking of PII (GDPR/EUDPR) and even there there are plenty of loopholes, creative interpretations, and “privacy shields”.
The push for sovereignty doesn’t just come from regulators, it comes from the companies themselves who lost trust in the US, and also from European providers who jumped on the opportunity to make a killing.
Which is just wildly backwards. It is the same mindset of the cyberpunk "privacy advocates" of the early 2000s, move your stuff to Sealand or Switzerland.
The fundamental flaw with this plan is if your fear is genuinely of the United States, your data is far more protected inside the US. The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.
Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data. Or ask a European intelligence service to use the much more lax laws to compel its disclosure.
Yes, data collection happens on US soil. But ask anyone who has worked on the inside how much of a pain it is to view or process USPER data.
>The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.
there have been several bombshell revelations in the last 1-2 decades which indisputably show that the US intelligence community also has (effectively) no restrictions operating on US citizen networks and servers, and often does so with the direct help of US companies.
the legal standards are worthless when they can just be ignored without consequence. when the standards happen to work, just buy the data from the private sector.
secondly, these changes are also about mitigating any retaliatory decisions made when the US government gets upset at how tall another country's leader is, or whatever.
I wish I believed that they have to go to the FISA court for much of anything any more. Instead they go to Palantir and the like which simply buy the data and aggregate it. Very similar to the process of money laundering. And for the data that can't be bought there's the five eyes work around.
The fear is not "NSA is snooping on our customer data", it's "Trump has a beef with our premiere minister/president, and Jeff Bezos accepted Trumps request to turn off AWS from them" that's the fear.
We're far beyond the default assumption that NSA snoops on absolutely everything, and more about protection ourselves from trade wars, tariffs and similar blockages as what Microsoft did with the ICC.
Compelling Microsoft to turn off your Office 365 at least requires Microsoft to be complicit. Sovereign infrastructure didn't protect Venezuela or Iran.
Karım Kahn at the International Criminal Court would like a word about that.
> Sovereign infrastructure didn't protect Venezuela or Iran.
Imagine if the control plane of the Shahed drones were hosted on AWS.
What are you even talking about?
So probably makes sense to host on EU headquartered companies
Well, there are also noises about the SaaS company preferably not being American. Apparently there's a US law that compels US companies to divulge data on their users even if the data is hosted outside of the US. (I'm not sure this wouldn't happen anyway, without such a law.)
Most nations can coerce information from corporate entities within their nation, even information that corporation holds outside said country. To what extents that coercion can hold will of course vary by local laws, customs and the people in charge. The US has a fairly large media footprint, not to mention it's actual physical size and outsized influence even then. So it is more covered and visible.
Inside the US, the biggest concerns similarly come with China, which I consider a bigger risk. For better or worse, if you're inside the US, you're probably better off holding as much of your presence as you can inside the US as EU requirements can actually be more harmful than helpful in terms of compliance. There are also certain protections and resistance you can take to less than formal (judicial warrant) requests. Only because if you hold an online presence in the EU, and are forced to violate EU laws, then you're in trouble on both sides.
I would assume similar in most cases, though the EU confederation is something I'm far less familiar with where national laws and EU laws conflict, etc. I'm more familiar with US state to federal structures.
I remember when iCloud arrangements required by China was seen as draconian. Now it seems we're not far from people cheering for such laws elsewhere...
How many in your estimation are moving to EU owned vs just EU hosted?
If you want to sell in Europe now or in the future to any governement ( city, provence, country, ... ).
It means EU sovereign cloud. That's literally the primary concern.
Surely there would have been mumblings in certain sectors of the EU since the first Trump administration?
It’s just that they started to execute now?
There been mumblings for as long as I've been a developer, I remember hearing about "EU data independence" first when the ePrivacy Directive came around, which must have been multiple decades ago at this point.
But yeah, in recent times the sentiment became more urgent. If I were to guess, with zero data in front of me and just judging by what I remember, I think the sentiment really changed first with the ICC blockade that happened last year, then it got really fueled on by the US threats to Greenland's sovereignty, I think that's when organizations and people really got stressed out about moving ASAP.
Around me, the threat to Greenland is what kicked the plans from “okay what mitigations should we envision?” to “alright, let’s go as far to actually run shadow ops to get acquainted with …” to full on move after the invasion.
Trump may genuinely end up being the best salesman European hosting companies ever had. I run one of the tools mentioned in this post (Bugsink) and I literally had an uptick of Danish people/companies (specifically) reaching out to me after Davos.
As someone who've basically started being known as "The guy who helps you move data out of US to Europe" in certain circles, I'm not complaining either :)
Yes, that was the thing that set off all the alarms. Trump 1 said a lot of things but had not completed the Hungary-fication of the US. Trump 1 was also before the Ukraine war!
I feel like the concern started getting popularised during the first Trump administration, because the US were overtly bullying the EU (and others of course). But the main change was that it was done overtly: before that the US has always been a big power trying to... say "defend the interests of the US" abroad. E.g. the US have been spying their allies forever. So I think it was more of a "they should stop bullying us in a few years", and indeed it went back to normal with Biden (again, "defending the interests of the US" and "leveraging their dominant position", which was kind of accepted).
The second Trump administration moved from "overtly bullying" to "behaving like a potential threat". In the second Trump administration, the US has used the tech monopolies against the EU and has become a military threat (not to mention the commercial war with tariffs). For many Europeans, it's not that the US are abusing their dominant position in negotiations anymore: it's that they are not an ally anymore. Not that they are seen as an enemy, but rather an unreliable partner who threatened to become an enemy.
I think that this is a very big shift, and that is why things are actually moving. And I don't think that this will change, because the risk of depending on the US monopolies has now materialised. That cannot be undone.
If even all the shenanigans from the US administration and essentially it threatening to invade European territory did not result in European companies and governments finally doing something about their digital sovereignty, then nothing but a declaration of war would.
I think this is pretty much what Mark Carney said at his speech in Davos.
Yeah, AWS even was trying to found a EU sovereign cloud precisely for this reason.
https://aws.eu/
I haven't heard of anyone moving to this, though.
I guess they eventually read their own local (US) laws and figured no one cares about that effort since Amazon is still covered by CLOUD Act, regardless of what ccTLD they happen to use for their landing page.
> The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
Once that was in place, AWS could host their "EU" servers on the moon for all I and others care, still not a solution to avoid the claws of the US.
Trump 2 is worse than Trump 1 by far from EU perspective. And it also proved that it wasn't a once-off that Americans will vote in someone who threatens to dismantle NATO, invade Greenland, or start trade wars with allies for no reason.
Also Trump 2 proves without a doubt that at least half of the american voters are absolutely insane or incredibly stupid. For 1 there used to be some doubt.
We in Europe are enjoying roughly 15-20% insane/stupid ratings at this point, which is not great but still a bit better.
Anyone that doesn't agree with you politically is insane or stupid?
Yes, anyone that threatens to invade a NATO ally is insane or stupid.
This logic applies if you believe it was an honest and fair election.
Doesn’t matter does it? If it wasn’t free of fair it still means the Trump team is the dominant team in America.
Let's face it. Trump 2 is about dismantling democracy. The administration radiates hostility and aggression to anything democratic. In the new national security policy the EU is the adversary of the US. If that isn't a wake-up call.
> Trump 2 is about dismantling democracy
Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how "if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
If a presidential candidate anywhere else was openly talking about wanting to remove elections and democracy in the country (not to mention triggered an insurrection [?!]), I'm fairly sure they'd almost be automatically disqualified. Really strange situation all around.
>Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of >this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how >"if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
1) Puerto Ricans were called publicly on a Trump rally in New York, an "island of garbage" and they massively voted for Trump.
- Second generation Latinos, whose many parents, and grand parents and other close family are illegal immigrants, were repeatedly warned of what would happen, and its one of the constitutions, that massively voted for Trump...
- Trump continued to state, as late as 2024,that the Central Park Five were responsible for the 1989 rape of a woman in the Central Park jogger case, despite the five males having been officially exonerated in 2002. - Trump was a leading proponent of the debunked birther conspiracy theory falsely claiming president Barack Obama was not born in the United States - Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination against African-American renters.
Donald Trump made big gains with Black voters in 2024.
- Trump is a convicted rapist and felon, and is known 44 million women voted for him...
We are past strange, and we are in the phase of electorate deserves what they voted for.
If you find yourself with a view of reality that massively differs from others, you have two options.
(1) Assume they’re irrational, uninformed, and wrong, or
(2) Reconsider your priors and attempt to understand why they think the way that they do.
Let’s take the “island of garbage”. It was said by a comedian during his set. The Trump campaign stated “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”.
The way that you framed it, however, was very careful to be true while also being misleading.
I think the viral quote "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." is probably pretty apt. The IRGC also has real support among the Iranian population. Putin clearly has strong support in Russia.
Generally, a lot of people are just not good people.
Sources for those quotes would be very helpful for anyone interested in this, because I’ve certainly never heard this before.
We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
> We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
I'm not American, I dislike Democrats and Republicans in the US, they're both horrible, just to preface this. Secondly, no other president has urged people to vote for them so people don't have to vote ever again, nor has any president threatened to put previous presidents in jail, nor has any president talked about wanting to skip the mid-terms.
I dislike politicians in general, but also, I'd be blind to not see when someone is extremely dangerous to democracy in general, beyond political affiliations. I'd say the same if it was Obama or who else, because as I said, I don't like any of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7l0Rq9E8MY
>> Sources for those quotes would be very helpful for anyone interested in this, because I’ve certainly never heard this before.
Asking for a quote of what he said so many times, and that is so easily found with a basic web search, says a lot about your comment.
He hasn’t said what the parent said he did, and in the peer comment linking a video of him saying something similar, the context supplies quite a different meaning than was implied above.
Here is a video of him saying it:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bTm0du4kUH0
Thanks for the context.
He’s speaking to evangelical Christians that do not regularly vote, and in the context of instituting voter ID to secure future elections.
ID is required to vote in most (all?) EU states.
From the a US perspective, EU hate each other and I see no way any temporary cohesiveness will last. Most EU countries are just as likely to elect a Trump in the next decade
> EU hate each other
I see how it may look like this from the outside. But I think it would be like saying that siblings hate each other because you witnessed an argument.
Most people in most EU countries consider the other EU countries as allies, even though they don't agree on everything. Now the fact that 27 countries argue means that they talk to each other. I think it's a lot less polarised than in the US. Or course there are extremes too.
The EU needs to be more vigilant than ever, though. Russia has been trying to export their nationalistic totalitarianism to the EU for decades and now the US has openly declared a goal of exporting their brand of blind ignorant nationalism to the EU as well. Both influences will boost alt-right parties if successful. The obvious intended outcome for both powers is a EU that is breaking up from the inside.
On the positive side, this shows that the EU has gained a level of international influence that is taken very seriously by other major powers. It's not 100% certain that it will survive this current wave of assaults, but if it does, it will be even stronger.
> Russia has been trying to export their nationalistic totalitarianism to the EU
Let's not pretend that nationalism doesn't have deep roots in Europe.
I have no idea how you'd measure it, but I suspect Republican states hate Democrat ones more than most European countries hate each other. Listen to the way they talk about California and New York.
> EU hate each other
What gave you the impression that EU members hate each other? It'd be a weird union if that was the case. Not saying it's not possible, I just haven't seen it myself, although I am a Swede so clearly I do hate the Danes and the Norrbaggar with passion, but it's love-hate, not hate-hate.
Likely OP refers to individual countries and quarreling leaders often favoring national interests to what would be best for the union.
> leaders often favoring national interests to what would be best for the union
If we're talking about leaders for member states, then they're doing their job right :) They're not meant to figure out what's best for the union, we have separate elections for those people who go to EU and represent the country + care about the union. The national "leaders" of the country are quite expected to put national interests above what's best for the union :)
Because of the convoluted way the EU works, those national leaders can have outsized power and even veto some decisions (Hungary, anyone?). The parliament needs to have more power if we want to make the EU more democratic.
I don't think it's worse than Midwest vs the coasts or Republican vs Democrat.
In the us these groups have just stopped talking to each other. The only time that happens is over Thanksgiving and that's when it stops for some of those conversations.
At least in Europe the split is usually not within families...
Are you referring to the time when the world Cup is going on? In that case, absolutely. We all turn into monkeys climbing onto our own rock lol
I saw a lot of privacy focused reactions when they cut off Trump from social media before his term ended, while still in office. National sovereignty should always be a consideration, especially when it comes to anything related to essential infrastructure. Not every country is able to insource everything, or even a portion of everything... but every country should make an effort to ensure than there is at least some domestic production for everything that is reasonable related to essential infrastructure.
The US, China, Russia, EU (as a whole) and maybe Brazil are the countries in the best position to be able to do that more than most others just by their size and positions. And even that has limitations.
For example, IMO, the US should be manufacturing at least half of it's prescription medications domestically... it should also be producing a significant portion of it's communications devices domestically as well. We're too dependent on Taiwan and South Korea for technology currently.
I would encourage every nation to consider and take steps towards ensuring their own infrastructure... this does not mean isolation, just security footing.
Thats overly flattering, there have always been good arguments for having your data in the same country (if not the same building) A worse case hypothetical trump is really much worse than the real one.
On the other hand it is also lame to shift the blame on the US. A bit like Jim stole your car after you left the doors open, the key in the ignition and the engine running. Jim is a bad man.
Trump wasn't threatening to invade European countries and supporting Putin's position in an ongoing war in term 1. He has been far more outwardly anti-EU in term 2.
Out of curiosity how much of this is a manifestation of the utility of LLMs? I get the current political impetus right now but also the barrier for swapping out an infra stack was also much higher 2 years ago. From my own projects major swaps are now relatively trivial which means that vendor lock in is weak.
Precisely none of it is related to LLMs. It's related to the political situation and the possibility of trade war and tariffs.
And actual war, given the threats to Greenland.
But especially that Microsoft blocked the work email of the ICC lead prosecutor for political reasons, that has all alarm bells ringing.
Given how bad the US military performed against Iran, its pretty clear that any hostilities started by the US against NATO, would finish with a takeover of Washington within...2 weeks...
What makes you say that?
Where does this weird expectation come from that you can basically achieve your goals in a 2 week air campaign?
If the US wanted to they could probably do a lot of damage but, as you can see in Ukraine, taking over a country is a whole different thing. Unless you're willing to go in with the army and are willing to lose a LOT of people. And even then it'll take months or years for a single country
Even if that fantasy was true in any way, the US can do enough damage to European digital systems to utterly cripple society on day 1.
And of course the actions in Iran and Venezuela, demonstrating that even the most braindead threats aren't just empty bluffing.
Besides some companies that were deep into the weeds of AWS and been pushed to enable and use every single AWS service by their reps, I don't think it's much harder/easier today than it was two years ago.
Sure, LLMs help a bit with the actual typing, but the hard part is still planning, alignment and actual execution, all which are best done by humans talking and working with other humans.
I don't think we're in the days of "Hey Codex migrate our AWS stack 100% to Hetzner VPS stat" yet, without issues along the way. Wouldn't claim it's impossible either, but again the easy parts were already easy, and the hard parts are still hard.
Architecting to make portability easier should absolutely be a thing. But people in the weeds of a specific public cloud provider today will absolutely need to make tradeoffs between getting to a position where they can be more portable and devoting those resources to other things.
> Architecting to make portability easier should absolutely be a thing.
It is, but it's really hard to make the right trade-offs. Usually I'd start by basically making a list of what could potentially be done to make it easier, check lightly how hard each one of those will be, then sit down with stakeholders and figure out the balance between how fast they want to move, and how risky they want the migration to be. Some opts for less safeguards and moving sooner, others for absolutely less risk but it takes the time it takes.
Some. Many companies have relied in the past on the fact that doing things is freaking complicated. Such as maintaining your own services instead of using something from a provider like AWS.
What used to be a half year transition project that will be half-assed due to resource constraints, can now be properly done in a month by a skilled engineering team works on it with LLM leverage.
Of course, if America was still a trusted ally (like if Harris was president), we still wouldn't be doing it. Even if it was easy now.
How do LLMs help with the mechanics of switching infrastructure stacks? Does writing code faster make infrastructure swap easier?
zero.
It is a manifestation of the commoditization of Cloud Computing Interfaces.
Every provider offers a blob storage, kubernetes clusters, queues and what not.
I'd argue that covers 90% of SaaS needs.
EU hosting their own ops like they built the Airbus A380:
Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain...
EU Fairness dictates they all need to get a slice of the pie so this will be interesting (and by that I mean absurdly hilarious).
> EU hosting their own ops like they built the Airbus A380: > Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain...
You snark, but is this not EXACTLY how a sizeable majority of modern apps are made?
Substitute in some random tech stacks, cloud providers, or buzzwords.
Database runs in AWS, front end in Nuxt, Operations in Claude.
Also, Airbus is doing very well last I checked.
And moving it’s stack… https://www.heise.de/en/news/Airbus-is-looking-for-a-soverei...
Like NASA rockets don't have components whose manufacture is very carefully distributed over all US states just to keep the senators happy.
In any case, there are plenty of EU giants (ASML, SAP, Siemens, Alstom, Rheinmetall, etc) that are rather concentrated geographically speaking. EU fairness is more a government agency distribution thing, not for private companies.
Isnt that how american contracts work?
You put your Headquarters in seattle, your data center in alabama, you have your dev team in SF... every state gets a slice
Like gov contracts and how they are divided is basically the largest conversation in defense contracts, they give more of a shit who will make the nails for a tank than the security parameters of the crew members
tank nails are so expensive though
Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore. Oh well, I'm looking forward to closer connections and relationships to our French and Belgian brothers and sisters :)
> Yeah, I guess we replaced globalism with Europalism, since some of the other parties who initially pushed for globalism now wants nothing to do with it anymore.
That is a very myopic way of looking at it. Right-wing neoliberal parties were globalists and pro-EU for business reasons. Left-wing social-liberals were pro-EU for social and ideological reasons but were much more ambivalent about globalisation. Hard-right nationalists hate the EU but don’t see much of a problem with globalisation except when people are involved (exploiting them abroad, however, is fine as long as there is a buck to be made). If you’re a bit careful you’ll find opinions all over the place on both globalisation and the EU across the whole spectrum.
Globalisation is more something that affect individual member states than a EU issue.
The A380 is a fantastic airplane to ride, so if that is the end result I’m a fan!
> Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain...
How is that worse than headquarters in New York, incorporation in Delaware, operations in California, and datacenters in Texas?
Well Airbus is doing much better than Boeing so I'm not sure what's the problem.
An entire continent's sentiment shifting to pull market share away from your team is nothing to snark at, regardless of whether the first iteration works perfectly out of the box. I can guarantee you someone in Europe is smart enough to eventually get their needs sorted.
I think we're going to witness a very inefficient system getting brought to work by policies alone.
And I'm not even bashing EU. The closest example still working today is probably the US's Jones Act.
Better than Boeing, I guess...
Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).
Being hosted in Canada is no longer the safety many assumed before. In reality it should not be an American company beholden to the current administration.
And that has never happened to any European company, right? (I'm looking at you ASML.) By your logic, does that mean that most European nations are "no longer the safety many assumed before"?
The example you mention is a tricky one, ASML is about as European as it is American. It is heavily subject to US export controls because its machines include US components, US software and US IP. They operate multiple R&D centers and factories in the US and employ a lot of US employees (~20%)
The first time I heard that the US was "requesting" (surely a gun-to-head moment) that the Dutch Gov't restrict ASML exports to China, personally, I was stunned. Sure, the Netherlands and US have incredibly strong political, economic, security, and historical bonds, but I never expected US to interfere so deep into the Netherlands. And yet, the Netherlands capitulated. (Please don't read this as a criticism of NL -- they are ultimately "Real Politik" due to their population size.) If NL can fall, then so can any other nation in Europe (or Northeast Asia: JP/KR/TW), except Belarus and Russia.
Out of curiosity, couldn't ASML replace the all of those elements with either their own development or new suppliers?
This is taking into account the worst case scenario, which isn't that unlikely to happen.
I mean, for sure there are these plans in motion already, but how hard would it be?
Not really, some of the IP is core to the product and it cannot function without it. In theory if you do something like come up with a complete replacement for EUV, you could, but everyone with deep pockets has already been trying to do that without success. Same goes for the supply chains, most companies (including ASML) don't manufacture everything themselves; so components that come out of the US would need non-US suppliers, which don't always exist.
I suppose it's a case of 'technically possible, realistically infeasible'.
A more likely scenario might be either a from-scratch not-as-good machine that you can source locally (supply-chain wise) or a novel finding (which is hard to predict if it will happen and if so, when).
Agree. This blog post about the history of ASML is absolutely brilliant: https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/how-asml-took-over-the-wo...
Not just ASML, when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company, the leadership and decision making was mostly US-based and centered around US policies, even if the HQ was still technically in the NL, but because PE and most other major investors were all US Bay Area.
For example my manager had to reject a candidate from Iran, simply due to US policies, even if that wasn't against the EU policies, and would actually have been illegal discrimination in the EU where the position was opened, but this policy came from the US and was applied in an unwritten fashion in the EU.
The influence of the US on finance and tech is massively understated. Plenty of international EU tech companies whose business model doesn't revolve around catering to the EU market and sovereignty, will tailor their products and operations to comply with US regulations since that's where a lot of their customer base and money is made. Just read the last post of the CEO of Bird, you can disagree with him that he's a scumbag and he's full of shit, but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US. That's why Mistral has a large presence in SV and London. Continental EU just sucks for acquiring capital.
Even at the no-name Austrian startup I used to work before, the biggest investor was a US PE, since no German or Austrian investor wanted to invest more than 5 figures in the company, which was not enough to cover the payroll of the ML/data scientists. As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
> but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US
Worth specifying here you're talking about VC-infested SaaS, not just your run-of-the-mill bootstrapped SaaS. It's very much possible to run a SaaS in Europe and make money, as countless of people already do, which I'm sure you too are aware of, but probably way harder to raise similar amount of money as US companies, that I'd agree with.
Edit: Strange typo; s/infested/invested, but kind of makes sense like that too so I'll just leave it, Freudian slip or something.
Spotify was also a " VC-infested SaaS".
Or a bit deeper: SMART Photonics, EFFECT Photonics, Nearfield, Prodrive Tech, Neways Elec.
Which one?
Let me respond in the most offensive manner possible: Do you prefer the teat of US or China (or Russia!)? Pick your poison.>Ok, come on, please stop playing this silly HN game of: "another major ... company".
It's not a "silly HN game" to not want to doxx yourself. Ironic criticism from someone whose username is 'throwaway2037' lol.
>Which one?
Exactly THAT ONE you mentioned above.
>Let me respond in the most offensive manner possible: Do you prefer the teat of US or China (or Russia!)? Pick your poison.
You can't talk about being sovereign if your life depends on someone else's teat.
Out of curiosity, did the startup you used to work for survive?
Yep, they grew quite well, though it was pretty toxic, just like a lot of small Austrian companies with PE as investors, lots of layoffs and people coming and going all the time, mismanagement, too much dependence on cheap foreign student visa labor, etc.
Seeing and hearing the same. When our giant private equity owners are even pushing us down the on-prem route.
I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.
I spoke with some high level folks at a very profitable private company recently and inquired as to why they had DBAs on staff for what amounts to a pretty simple OLTP type system. Id naively assumed that someone of that scale would be using a cloud provider (RDS for AWS etc) thus negating the need for someone who really knows DB internals and upgrades and OS level stuff.
The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize.
I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country.
Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?
Cloud-In-A-Box anyone?
> Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?
It's more like cloud-in-a-rack, but that's what https://oxide.computer/ is trying to do isn't it?
From our perspective I'm not sure the cloud abstraction is better or we even want it to be done like that locally. Look at S3 as an API for example. It's absolutely dire. I'd rather use NFS (!). And stuff like Lambda and Cloud Functions are just cat turds.
On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size and scale so we have to run on bare metal. That just makes it really fucking expensive colocation.
Lambda is awesome .. until you actually try to use it for realsies. Cat turd is an apt description. Just being able to get the damn logs for debugging is itself a hassle. Terraform helps a ton in all this and I rarely find myself using the AWS UI anymore. Still Lambda is a great idea that just doesn't deliver for any use case more than responding to some S3 upload action or Event Bridge operation.
Don't even get me started on the API Gateway sitting in front of a group of related Lambdas. Its OK once you get it setup and running but buildign/changing it amounts to stabbing yourself in the eyes.
I saw you post "lambda is awesome" and was going to reply with "only in certain circumstances." But you beat me to it.
After about a year of poking lambda to see how it actually worked (versus how it was documented) and building a cloud formation replacement (TF eventually did what I wanted, but not before I made a simple PROLOG based replacement for it). But I finally made it work after MUCH struggle.
So... +1.
I put this in our code several years ago: "WARNING: Do not look at Lambda stack with remaining eye."
Those local options exist, and have been around forever, but the problem is nobody is doing it without cutting corners and with pay-as-you-go elasticity (and the 'call an API, get a VM instantly' effects that go with it).
Most on-prem deployments were trash and a lot of them still are. Not because it couldn't be better but because it's easier to just have some random hypervisor department do this work manually and not do the work to create it as an internal product. Even VMware with vrealize failed and that's about as 'customisable cloud platform in a box' as COTS enterprise software can get.
Maybe it's because IaC and APIs were just not in the vocabulary of the average system integrator or on-prem operating team (it's still lots of clickops and copy-paste).
You are likely describing software like Proxmox which has quietly been able to do so much for a long time.
Open source, and works great when small, and at scale.
https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to...
Sounds like HPE GreenLake.
On prem / self-hosted used to be the norm.
The "cloud" rose to prominence from a small period of tiem where Amazon had a lot of extra cloud capacity outside of Black Friday, etc, and linux networking issues that needed architecture to be a certain way.
Those linux networking issues have been long since solved, but the "cloud" was discovered to be incredibly profitable and sticky in the name of convenience and proliferated.
A lot of the "cloud" software is open source software that was packaged to have a web and api front end, and that service renamed to something specific to AWS, etc.
Yup, I've been seeing the same development pretty much everywhere. It's become a standard question in procurement processes in all EU-based organizations I've worked for (I'm a consultant).
I feel this and as a German company, we have our stuff hosted in the EU. But where it becomes pointless to have the host in the EU, is when Cloudflare is a requirement. Since we expose ourselfs through their certificate, we might as well host with a US company. And I’m not aware of a EU Cloudflare competitor with similar WAF offering.
this is good, there's money to be saved in many many cases with self hosting. Cloud was supposed to save money but it's gotten so overdone that now companies have dedicated devops teams just like they use to have dedicated sysadmin teams. I think you can take the opensource paas's out there and selfhost something internal that covers 75-70% of your use case at a fraction of the cost of aws/gcp/azure.
The price of hardware (DELL, HP), and the price of enterprise software (VMWare, Nutanix, etc.) has increased an insane amount in the last 12 months. In our case some of the services it has been as much as 6x. Hardware quotes are rising 10-20% per week. Delivery dates are months out.
It has become so bad that we're considering moving to the cloud for our on-premise workloads. Only problem is some of the cloud providers in the areas we operate from have run out of compute.
The fact that these "move off US infra" posts now routinely hit #1 on HN is itself pretty telling. Another example is the public outcry here in the Netherlands over selling off the company doing the infra for an important citizen-facing piece of government software (DigiD)...
It's interesting the economic damage a few disgruntled WASP's in US swing states can do to the US economy by electing an orange toddler.
> (albeit over Teams)
Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.
Learning to self-host, or host on different platforms is critical.
Designing startups from the beginning to be able to be hosted in different places will become a norm.
i mean it makes so much sense, cause of the political instability. I recently was at a reception (because of the europe day) and there I talked to some officials that told me that even they don't really know how to to tackle the problems of nowadays. Basically every european state is trying to move its IT infrastructure from the US to Europe and i read somewhere in the news that Aldi is supposed to provide infrastructure to compete with AWS...
It is a subsidiary of Lidl: https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/140634/dutch-cen...
Loss of trust towards US is one factor; another is enshittification of services; yet another are good enough monopolies that EU don't have capital to disrupt
I'm willing to wager a bet the former reason is the bigger reason. Many of the data migrations I've helped with, been to services that owners know are slightly worse or doesn't have one feature they ideally should have had, but because of the first reason, it's more important to move now than to wait for it to be perfect. I don't think many are migrating because of "enshittification of services", I haven't heard that as a reason myself at least.
This is not a change. It has been asked since the advent of GDPR. So nearly 10 years.
It started 10 years ago, but have def escalated the last year IMHO.
Im sorry to say it, but i feel a lot of Europeans have lost a good deal of trust in the US.
The USA is threatening war with the the EU and its allies. A loss of trust doesn't quite convey the seriousness of relationship destruction this causes and the monumental shift that is now happening.
Leaders are not conveying so much about the loss of trust, because they are saving face for the US to try to rescue what little can be rescued of the remaining relationship.
probably also to not make feel Trump too isolated in fears he does something unfixable.
The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome. I recently was in a discussion about what kind of responsibility we can put on the residents of the US for this situation. A US lawyer answered "well the 25th amendment ties our hands, and we do a lot of protesting so no blame on us". The judgement on US citizens was pretty harsh.
You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
> The complete disinterest in international allies from the American public is troublesome.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the American public. I am interested in America's standing in the world. More than half of Americans do not support these lunatics. Unfortunately due to our inherently unfair electoral system which gives preference to money and land over voters, it requires about 60~70% of Americans voting against them consistently for at least a decade to overcome the lunatics. That's just a very high bar to clear.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
Open to suggestions. The only ideas I have for relinquishing control of the US from the billionaires back to the people would, rightly, get me banned from HN.
So true. Now, what level of blame can we put on the EU for not supporting Ukraine more over the past few years, with all the vetoes from Hungary?
I think the blame for Hungary falls on Hungary?
I'm not sure what you're referring to: https://www.kielinstitut.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukrai...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq6jrvgqeejo
Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban.
Trust is broken forever.
What's ironic to me in these discussions is how similar Ukraine was at one time to the current US administration (probably not by coincidence). Things change quickly.
>"Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban."
Well, EU and the rest of the world owes nothing to Ukraine, yet they have provided much help. Blind trust is stupid anyways. Especially between countries.
>"Trust is broken forever."
This sounds like a drama queen. Look at your own politicians first.
Look at the numbers.
There is a way in which this whole situation has been revealing to me about how little some outside the US actually understand about US politics and civic structures, or alternatively have their own form of isolationism.
The heterogeneity in the US — culturally and in terms of political-legal structures — is far greater than those in Europe and Canada seem to understand sometimes. This is now combined with a corruption of democratic legal processes (e.g., gerrymandering) that make options outside of outright civil war a needle increasingly difficult to thread. There is a reason people are bringing up Hungary — it would be absurd to equate the EU with Hungary for the same reasons it's absurd to paint the entire US with a broad brush.
Something like 90% of people in the US opposed what was going on with Greenland. Just about the only people in favor of it in the US were the presidential administration and people trying to curry favor with it. What do you expect the other 90% to do? The legislators being petitioned were busy with a deluge of other immediate domestic problems — maybe people outside the US didn't understand the scope of the unaccountable fascist police occupation going on in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles? Protesters in Minneapolis were being murdered by these thugs. That's not even getting into the dismantling of social safety nets, rampant corruption, Venezuela, etc etc etc
People outside the US do not want a US civil war. It's happened before and if it happened again would happen along the same geopolitical lines as before. It would be devastating not just to the US but to the rest of the world.
Treating everyone in the US as the same, without recognizing the very real divisions involved, or the structural stresses involved, doesn't help anything.
Everything happening in the US could happen everywhere. If you have enough politicians distorting and destroying traditional democratic mechanisms in favor of a criminal fascist and party domination, people have fewer and fewer options left outside of things that no one wants.
"The complete disinterest in international allies" is a dishonest statement, and I can only assume reflects total ignorance of what is happening in the US, and/or a self-serving defense mechanism to avoid really confronting the difficulty of what those in the US are faced with.
I don’t think the billionaire technofascists will just stop by their own volition, no matter how nice we ask.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
As an American, that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn (unless we're buying a tshirt or something) and have been for many presidential administrations. Why would Americans be interested at all in what allies have to say when it's always negative anyway? When someone tells you you're their enemy long enough you begin to believe them.
As for the discussion of moving tech stacks to Europe, if that's where your company is why did that not make obvious sense day 0? Why would you place your critical infrastructure in another country not beholden to your laws? If you're based in Europe then you should host in Europe, and even further, host in your country.
> that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn
457 British solders dead in Afghanistan supporting US operations beg to differ.
Mate, seriously, step away from the propaganda and pay attention to what is happening to your democracy. Then you might understand why your allies are losing trust.
It should be a matter of shame, not pride, to the British that they followed a jingoistic US into a needless war in Afghanistan which achieved nothing but much senseless death.
It was.
The 2003 protests against the war in Afghanistan were the biggest in UK history. Approximately 1 Million people (1 in 60 of the UK population) made their way to London to protest, and hundreds of thousands protested in other cities on the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_Iraq_War_prot...
What makes you say that wars are unnecessary? You don't get to see what would have happened in the absence of a war. Keeping some countries like Iran in check by restricting their arsenal, or weakening their economies and military capabilities seems absolutely necessary for world peace for example.
Deciding not to join our little adventure in Iraq was not a hostile act.
We have gained a lot of confidence that having control ourselves is actually enormously valuable.
trust or not, US vs EU or somewhere else, you should be in charge of your data and your data should be subject to your laws and yours alone. It only makes sense.
/lives in the US
Agreed, but that's not how it was because of trust. And now it's changing because of lack of trust.
It often feels like US people never trusted the EU and now feel offended when EU people say "we don't trust the US anymore". I find that interesting.
As a European: yes definitely. And that won't be fixed if you choose a sane administration again. There can always be another Trump. It will take significant time to build trust again.
> It will take significant time to build trust again
and nothing of value was lost. What did the US get out of the relationship?
gestures confusingly towards all the American digital services used in EU
I thought that was exactly what is being talked about here.
The fact that you're being downvoted for this shows that Americans are not unaware, but actively in denial instead.
In some cases but not enough. Some of us has been doing a lot to help educate companies and business here and with the current administration - and the fact that they are being explicitly backed/funded by the Silicon Valley tech companies long resisted government overreach - have helped to finally open ears in boardrooms to the dangers of the Cloud Act and other leverage.
GDPR gave us "oh cool AWS has eu-west-1 and pretends to comply so we can also pretend to comply" but I think the tone has shifted to actually caring, at least a little bit. And with the CLOUD act all the US based hyperscalars can't really offer compliant hosting.
GDPR is a bureaucratic annoyance. Trump is an existential threat.
Trump is not the core issue since he isn't a hereditary monarchical dictator.
It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less.
No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.
Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems. The real enduring toxic legacy is the packing of SCOTUS, sold to voters as a means of overturning Roe V Wade but in fact a massive enabler for corruption and gerrymandering. Those guys are there until they die or Democrats grow a spine, probably the former.
>Well, neither was Orban, and he caused huge problems.
Any democratically elected leader can cause huge problems during their mandate, not just Orban or Trump. You have to wait for elections or their term limit to kick them out peacefully.
The difference is whatever the person in the US president seat does, massively affects the whole world, not just the US, which is why we talk a lot more about the huge problems Trump caused rather than what problem the president of Romania, HUngary or Greece cause in their own countries.
The issue remains the voting population to not elect people like Orban or Trump at the next elections. The EU can cancel or sway elections in Romania or Hungary to make sure the right candidate wins, but it can't sway US elections in their favor.
The EU absolutely can't cancel elections in EU countries!
I started the process of this back in January and now, at least in terms of product hosting; fully migrated into European infrastructure (https://bannermedia.ltd).
It didn't come without a bit of pain, but glad I've done it - and to come with this I've ended up building a whole terraform setup for cross provider / cross region high availability within Europe.
So far my key mappings included:
- Cloudflare -> Bunny CDN (and honestly I am so impressed with Bunny so far)
- AWS (or similar) -> Hetzner + OVH; I'm also looking at Civo.com for UK presence.
- GitHub -> Forgejo. I do actually still operate in GitHub for development only work, however Forgejo is mirrored within my European private network, and thats where deployment workflows happen.
- Google Analytics -> Self hosted Umami.
I'll be doing a writeup fairly soon on the entire process.
Waiting for your writeup, especially the Bunny part. We moved away from AWS but Cloudflare remains a point of failure, we are going to remove it as soon as we have some spare time to do the required research.
What are you looking for? I use Bunny CDN along with Bunny Shield, and together they're better than Cloudflare for me. It's $10/month, but I can afford it for the privacy of my users. Bunny's aggressive bot blocking without bothering the vast majority of users with regular challenge pages provides a much better UX.
But Bunny Shield is not a Cloudflare WAF replacement afaik. Not even close.
Honestly my needs are not super complicated. There are a few edge rules I have in place to try and block things like the TikTok Bytespider which is hammering one of my sites. It's able to support round-robin multi-endpoint DNS, including weightings you can update which is super useful for what I'm doing. I've only really needed to speak to support twice so far; one was to get un-blocked because I migrated all my sites too quickly on a fresh account lol, so triggered their suspicious activity (so just be aware of that) - but both times they replied within an hour and resolved things.
Instead of Hetzner, I found UpCloud to be a great EU alternative. Reliable, cheap and supportive.
Did you use Cloudflare for it’s WAF too or just CDN? Last I checked Bunny is not a replacement for the CF WAF.
> looking at Civo.com for UK presence
Hadn't come across Civo. They advertise "transparent" pricing, but I can't seem to find prices for VMs... or anything else!
Maybe it's just me, but do you have a link to a pricing page perchance?
> - AWS (or similar) -> Hetzner + OVH; I'm also looking at Civo.com for UK presence.
At some point deciders at EU companies are going to notice that Hetzner and/or OVH are also not a bit but much cheaper than AWS.
We already use them for our egress heavy services.
Solid list! To expand upon it, Let's Encrypt -> ZeroSSL.
While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways. For example, they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection'[1]
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_AT...
I think that's a very different kind of concern, and its also been very predictable and slow.
I would also say though, you have to be a bit careful about "they are discussing" because there are many people across different countries with different agendas, and a huge amount of discussion between people. Your link for example is a pretty good bit of background info, clearly saying VPNs aren't just about accessing porn
> In the corporate world, VPNs are essential for secure remote work, allowing employees to access company systems without compromising sensitive information. For individual users, VPNs prevent tracking by internet service providers, advertisers and potential cybercriminals. They are also used to access educational or entertainment content that may be restricted in certain countries, including authoritarian regimes, supporting freedom of information and digital inclusivity, as censorship becomes more difficult to enforce through VPN use.
It links off to sites discussing possible approaches to age verification which highlights that various approaches in France didn't meet the regulators requirements because of a lack of privacy.
I think this is a different kind of concern about how your products must work compared to worrying that with little to no notice your country may be cut off due to a diplomatic spat from some specific service.
US: Threatens own democracy, invades other nations, threatens sovereignty of long standing allies.
EU: Slowly makes laws with consideration of how much power the largest companies have over consumers.
Surely you can tell the difference between these two things.
Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better. Lots of laws allow people to protect themselves from digital exploitation.
I agree that there is a ton of bullshit as well though. Gotta dox myself with imprints for example, so I cant share my work with people without also doxing myself. Also as a hobbyist you pretty much need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore. Also gotta make sure that data of European citizens never leaves Europe and and and... Lots of things to remember.
And before anyone asks, yes I know an imprint usually is only required for businesses, but nowadays pretty much everything could have business intent.
Well, as a German consumer, I gotta say it's pretty darn great to be able to pinpoint a website to an actual business. It's a good way to judge how legitimate an online shop is before ordering, for example; and if anything goes wrong, I know there is someone I can hold accountable.
Yea from a consumers perspective its neat. From a hobbyist dev perspective not so much.
As a hobbyist dev you don't need an imprint - unless you're selling software, at which point you're a business and your customers should be able to hold you accountable for it.
You need an imprint for pretty much everything, as I wrote earlier. Even a hobbyist Youtube channel requires one if you're strict with it. It's enough that said thing could have business intent and I want to emphasize the could here. To be completely sure, you'd have to check with a lawyer.
> It's enough that said thing could have business intent
So, it is a business.
Is me writing a blog post about how much I personally like hamburgers a business? Because that can be interpreted as having business intent in Germany. As soon as I drop the name of a fast food restaurant, it can be interpreted as advertisement that I got paid for. Yes I could easily prove that this isn't the case if asked, but thats work.
Not so. German courts actually take a look at the site and apply common sense judgement. If it's obviously a personal blog, nobody is going to successfully litigate against you. There's a lot of FUD involved in these discussions.
I'd never heard of that imprint stuff but that's pretty Draconian yeah. If it will start being required for foreign sites I'll block all German IPs.
I avoid doing any business in Germany these days. I tried to get a VPS from Hetzner but they demanded a copy of my ID and didn't accept that I blanked out my citizen number. Which is actually recommended by our national police for identify theft risk.
I moved to Scaleway instead. Much better company.
Yea that was my bad, its Germany specific. I sometimes forget Europe usually isnt as tight as Germany when it gets to these kinda things.
I am from Canada and when renting from Hetzner was never asked about personal ID. Maybe because I started few years ago. Never knew about Scaleway. Looked at their website - prices for bare metal seem to be higher than in Hetzner
The ID checks are random. When I registered a while back I had to provide mine, so I aborted the registration. I tried again recently and was not asked for one.
> Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better.
I'm see a lot of "worse" in your comment and not seeing any "better". Can you give some examples of that?
Imprint is not needed everywhere in Europe. You need it in Germany, but you don't in the UK.
True, I guess Germany has a lot of extra layers to all this. It's really not easy to actually publish anything without being in risk of some bored lawyer making your life hell.
> You need it in Germany, but you don't in the UK
Erm, dude....
Applies to business letters, order forms, websites, emails ....Might not be called "imprint" in UK-speak, but its basically the same thing.
> need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore
And this is a bad thing why exactly ?!?!?!
If you respect your users data and right to privacy then you've got nothing to hide by publishing an EU compliant privacy policy.
It might be "just a small app", but I and many other people still very much still "do give a damn" about what the hell you do with my data, where you store it, how long you store it and how I can exercise my GDPR rights.
Because if I want to provide an app to like 5 people I know personally, I am soon forced to do so via the Playstore due to Google disabling sideloading on Android. So now I am forced to inform myself about all the bullshit documents I never cared for beforehand. Yes I know what I am allowed to do with my users data, no I don't send it to some data brokers, yes I already comply to privacy laws and whatnot. Just requiring some official document that you have to let a lawyer take a look at is beyond me.
Be mad at Google [0], not at privacy laws.
[0] https://keepandroidopen.org/
Of course. But then again, it was the US that threatened the EU with military invasion, so if you want your service to continue uninterrupted, it helps being prepared.
Currently, if you want the internet-climate of the 1990s or even 2010s, you need to build yours, preferably on a different planet, with your own hardware.
We don't have any "ideal" places anymore.
And we need to defend what we support and believe.
Have you been around at that time? NSA had recording boxes at ISP routing places, every few days guy would come to swap hdds. Most com was unencrypted. Or read about echolon...
Yeah echelon seemed overwhelming at the time, and encryption was to be the answer.
But it turn out surveillance works just fine if you only focus on the meta data. Knowing who takes to whom, and which sites people visit is much more valuable (and much cheaper) than scanning the actual payload.
And why collect all that data yourself if ad companies are happy to sell it to you, ie to the government? (Huh, maybe that's why Facebook changed its name to Meta, come to think of it)
The Onion news article stating that Facebook is owned by CIA (or FBI, I don't remember well) aged like milk, to be honest.
I was four when I was programming my Commodore 64.
I have seen "parallel [dial-up] modem banks" for "lawful interception", then specialized Ethernet cards for DPI, watched traffic analysis dashboard of a REDACTED country live, did DPI on powerful-enough systems myself for personal testing.
I have gone through USENET, flame wars, IRC; did my own MITM, etc. Always knew about echelon, how escrow based Encryption canceled last moment, etc. etc. etc.
At least, the barriers were higher then. These barriers required people to be considerate, well-targeted and selective. Now we don't have any of these. The overhead is almost non-existent for these things.
Doing dragnet operations were costly, and this allowed curious yet good-hearted people to understand the environment they lived in. Now, we're all blacklisted by default and whitelisted as long as we don't touch the wrong paving stone on the internet.
It used to be other way around.
TL;DR: I'm not 15 years old.
This is exactly right. The new internet is analogous to cable television, but of course so much worse in many ways. The outrage and addiction are far worse, there are brand new privacy constraints, and of course it's controlled by powerful business interests with much more time and resources to pump into the problem than you have to fight it.
Yeah I think we're going to need something like tor soon, but with more mass market appeal. The internet as we know it is dying.
With the lack of encryption at that time I assume the NSA and similar agencies could read almost anything they wanted.
The author isn't just moving their personal setup; they're also moving their business operations. It's not some slacktivism 'I don't like the US any more' issue; it's a 'how can I maintain my income now the US is firing all its glass cannon' issue.
Yeah except he made multiple exceptions and justified them with "OK well I guess these can stay because they're better than what's available in Europe." So it's not exactly "I have my values and I'm sticking with them no matter what."
The funny thing is that the EU will tout this move away from US clouds as one of their successes, even though they have done literally everything to cripple EU tech ecosystem.
If you/your company is already inside the EU, you can't really escape the EU's unpredictability, but you can to some extend reduce the blast radius of the American government's whims.
So are certain states of the USA: https://www.ipvanish.com/blog/ban-vpns-us-privacy/
It's horrible everywhere. If you're in the EU go donate to: https://epicenter.works/ They're a citizen rights NGO working against all that BS in the EU (and in Austria, where they're from).
Utah has already implemented this. But yes this and Chatcontrol is very bad. The EU is not all good and we need to keep fighting such government overreach.
Also, the "open your app store to competitors" was just bullshit, eyewash, cop out. The apps on these "alternative app stores" still need to jump through all the hoops, pay apple development fees, get approved etc.
American company maliciously complying with the law, thinking they can get away with it? Never heard about such thing!
Jokes aside, the long arm of the law takes some time, it took us long time go get Apple to even allow alternative app stores. Eventually they'll get fined and actually start following the spirit of the regulations, but it'll take time as they try to drag it out as much as they can.
> they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection
Oh FFS!
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law. Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous).
This is how our democracies work!
Implying government discussions will be approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
Why do you think entirely different countries and states with entirely different politics across Europe Canada and America all pushing the same policy coincidentally within the space of 6 months has anything to do with democracy.
It’s people being paid off and it’s obvious.
External influence and lobbyism is part of the democratic process for sure. Stable democracies have self-correcting mechanisms to defend against too much pressure from any side. There is no reason (yet) to doubt the effectiveness of the European Union's self-correcting mechanisms.
IMHO, you're both right: There is an active, covert political campaign for more online surveillance under the guise of child protection going on world-wide right now; so much is clear to anyone following the various attempts everywhere. Yet as of now, this campaign hasn't lead to actual, harmful legislation in the EU.
> Implying government discussions will be approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
Don't get too much up in your arms about it, any topic about Europe and EU on HN ends up with huge swaths of American commentators seemingly willfully misunderstanding or spreading FUD in these comment threads.
You'll get used to it eventually, so you can identify what's the real criticism and worthwhile discussions, vs the easy trolling attempts.
While it's worrying this is being discussed, it's just that, a discussion, for now.
Utah, meanwhile, has an actual law in place that makes site owners (!) responsible for their users using VPNs: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/vpn/utah-becomes-first...
> they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection'
Just like with encryption, there will always be an idiot politician somewhere discussing banning it. Mr Google tells me, for example, that lawmakers in Michigan (US) recently proposed " Anticorruption of Public Morals Act" which contained VPN banning clauses.
Frankly, until such time as it actually NEARS, let alone BECOMES legislation, the only thing posts such as yours are doing is spreading FUD.
The clue is in the URL you post "thinktank". It not even EU parliament, let alone been through the parliament debates, let alone passed to votes, let alone passed to being implemented by member states .... its just a random idea someone wrote down.
And quite frankly, I would still much rather be in the EU's digital environment than that of the US.
Not only that but if you actually read the linked document it isn't calling for a VPN ban. It's a general report on what VPNs are and how they're perceived by various bodies. It does make reference to the UK Child Safety Commissioner's suggestion that they should be restricted to adult use only but it also talks about how essential they are for business etc. On the whole it's quite balanced and the existence of such a report seems very reasonable.
> its just a random idea someone wrote down.
It's a result from the "European Parliamentary Research Service", hosted on the official website of the European parliament. And it is fully inline with recent attempted and success legislation of the same parliament. I am not sure why you would call this a "random idea" and an established member of the Parliamentary Research Service as "someone".
> "European Parliamentary Research Service"
And if we go to the homepage for "European Parliamentary Research Service", we see:
So a Member of Parliament asked them to conduct this piece of RESEARCH, so what ? It may or may not ever see the light of day in parliament !Across all publication types, the "European Parliamentary Research Service" published 1034 documents in 2025 and, 486 documents so far in 2026. And for this specific publication type ("At a glance"), they published 285 in 2025 and 113 so far this year.
How many of those hundreds of documents per year of RESEARCH actually make it all the way through to legislation I don't know .... but I think you'll find its a safe bet that its a fraction.
Research.
Not implementation.
My understanding is that the research service is providing legislation with research to inform them on how to implement. What is your claim? That the parliamentary research service is just a bunch of people writing documents nobody cares about and if you look just long enough you will find for each of their results something that claims the opposite?
> My understanding is that the research service is providing legislation with research to inform them on how to implement
And do you think the research would be complete or honest if it didn't present criticisms and a comprehensive list of use cases for VPNs? It says so many positive things about VPNs and describes them as "essential" so it's really difficult to comprehend how anyone could spin it as somehow calling for a VPN ban.
As I replied before, in that document,
>As the EU reviews cybersecurity and privacy legislation, VPN services may also come under stricter regulatory scrutiny. For instance, it is likely that the revised Cybersecurity Act will introduce child-safety criteria, potentially including measures to prevent the misuse of VPNs to bypass legal protections.
Again, I can't quite fathom how you're spinning that.
> "may also come under," "it is likely that," "potentially including."
And that's potentially including only " measures to prevent the misuse of VPNs to bypass legal protections" which is a very specific thing.
And it even comes as part of a report that also lists genuine uses of VPNs including secure remote work, protection from surveillance and circumventing authoritarian censorship.
> My understanding is that the research service is providing legislation with research to inform them on how to implement.
Dude, just go read the damn website.
The research service does not operate on its own volition. An MEP requests a piece of research to assist them in their parliamentary work because they require independent, objective and authoritative analysis of a topic.
Please stop with the damn conspiracy theories. Sheesh.
A random MEP asked for this research. The MEP may or may not ever table anything based on the research. Ergo, it may or may not ever progress into the parliamentary debate, let alone votes, let alone member state implementation.
Its just RESEARCH.
Stop with the FUD.
I am not aware I was spreading conspiracy theories, and I do not understand why you have to be so aggressive and simultaneously defensive.
An independent, objective, and authoritative analysis requested by a MEP speculates that a restriction or ban on VPN is likely. I think this is valuable information. You are saying this is worth nothing until it actually gets up to a vote. I disagree, I see your point and maybe it's fine to panic only when it actually comes to a vote, but I prefer to know what to expect, and what the Research Service considers an "independent, objective, and authoritative analysis" on this topic.
> analysis requested by a MEP speculates that a restriction or ban on VPN is likely.
What the hell are you on about ?
There are what, 700 MEPs from 27 member states ?
Do you even realise the sheer amount of work required to get it from "piece of RESEARCH an MEP requested" to "legislation enacted by member state" ?
And that assumes it survives parliamentary debates and votes intact !
Just because an MEP requested a piece of RESEARCH it DOES NOT MEAN it is "likely" to become legislation.
Stop with the conspiracy theories.
Trump was "researching" and not "implementing" taking Greenland by force, yet it sure did whip people up into a frenzy.
Meanwhile, "researching" chat control, VPN restrictions, etc.? "Oh it's just research, they're not actually going to do it."
> Trump was "researching" and not "implementing" taking Greenland by force,
No? He was making direct threats.
> Oh it's just research, they're not actually going to do it."
Yes, would you rather they just legislate by pure vibes?
> While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways.
It makes a lot more sense if you realize pretty much the sole motivation behind all this digital virtue signaling is "put my data somewhere Trump isn't."
Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"? There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
The political systems of the USA and the EU are extremely dissimilar. The US, by virtue of their "winner takes it all" mentality, is evidently pretty vulnerable to a mad leader single-handedly destroying decades of progress. Whereas the EU isn't a single entity, but a federation of 27 member states without central leadership. There is no "EU government", and thus no single corruptible entity that could turn "insane".
Virtue signaling apparently means making decisions based on the current reality instead of a future hypothetical.
> Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"?
Where did you try to find this? And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here? There are a bunch of contingencies already in place for economic instability both for individual members states and EU-wide, there is "Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union" in case there is one rogue member, and then each member state has a bunch of their own contingencies already too.
What exactly is missing here?
> There's always an implicit assumption that EU politics will always be "sane" (read: "aligned with my personal politics").
I think you might severely misunderstand how decisions are made in EU, and also how regulations and such are actually implemented. I don't think there is any such assumptions at all, that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.
Where are you even getting these misconceptions from?
I think you misunderstood what I was talking about, or perhaps you're an example of it.
> And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here?
It means, "what if the EU starts acting belligerently to other countries like the US has?" Where, hypothetically, would someone move their data since now the US and EU are off the table?
And if your answer is "well, you see that would simply be impossible because <waves hands about EU policy making>", then I guess you're an example of someone believing that EU politics will forever remain sane.
> that's why we have elections, votes and referendums, because people and states have different opinions about what is sane vs not.
Same situation as the US...
> It means, "what if the EU starts acting belligerently to other countries like the US has?" Where, hypothetically, would someone move their data since now the US and EU are off the table?
You mean if a EU member state does this? Then those contingencies I mentioned earlier will be used.
If you're a EU member and another EU member does that, you'd still have your data in EU, just not in that member state, if you had that.
> And if your answer is "well, you see that would simply be impossible because <waves hands about EU policy making>", then I guess you're an example of someone believing that EU politics will forever remain sane.
I've literally pointed you to concrete and very real contingencies that exists today, zero hand-waving.
> Same situation as the US...
I don't know how it works there, I just know that no one in the EU assumes everyone else will always agree with you, and if you look at how democracy works in EU and in the member states, I don't think anyone has those assumptions there either.
> It means, "what if the EU starts acting belligerently to other countries like the US has?"
How? With what army? The EU is, on purpose, physically incapable of doing this.
From this thread, I am not convinced you really grasp how the EU works or what it actually is.
While the EU currently offers more privacy than the US, the best solution would be to use services which no one could have any meaningful control over, as much as possible, except the user.
Self-hosting (including object storage, backups, CDNs) is hard, but doable for some companies. For others it's life-and-death due to costs.
Analytics should be kept at a minimum and should always be self-hosted.
Email should die and be replaced with some E2EE solution. Matrix is far from perfect but if I were to make a website now, I would offer the choice of a Matrix address for account creation and comms. It's still federated and, while not offering 100% privacy, is much better than email, which offers none.
Using a service for transactional email is something that shouldn't be required in an ideal world. That it is only shows how email is captured by a few big players who simply won't deliver your message even if you follow the best practices when setting up your server.
Payment services shouldn't be required in an ideal world, either. They're needed because of a bunch of regulations and unnecessary complexities that could've been avoided and aren't needed from a technical POV.
AI use is troublesome when a company is not using their self-hosted models. As a customer, I wouldn't want my data being shared to a US company or an EU one, although if I had to choose, I'd say EU would be the lesser evil.
It is good to diversify but people should really not make Europe out to be some sanctuary. European governments (and thus companies) are still going to cooperate with America. When the day comes when they do not, America's reach will still be long.
Never mind the fact that incentives in Europe are not so different from the USA. It may look that way now, but often moving across the globe just means trading one villain for another.
Still a good idea, just a word of caution. If people make a move such as this based on some assumption about the stability of the European regulatory scheme you may want to examine that assumption with a little more rigor.
This. The privacy threats are somewhat different, but they still stem from government. The EU has tried to attack end-to-end encryption more than once, and they will try again. They are now requiring logging of IP addresses, and ever more tracking of use activities. The legislation requiring age verification is the camel's nose in the tent - expect them to require full ID soon. Etc.
All Western governments have clearly decided to restrict individual rights to privacy, political advocacy, and free speech in general. The way this is happening simultaneously in so many countries seems a clear indication of a coordinated effort.
For corporations this shift isn't about sanctuaries or ethical questions anyway, but about fear of running into EU road blocks placed for political reasons (maybe to penalize tariffs), long-term EU regulation enforcing data to stay in EU or even fear of retaliatory actions by US against EU economy.
Currently Europe is one of the last larger sanctuaries for democracy and freedom. Sad but true.
European sanctuary is good for Europeans. The USA is not a reliable partner and has uncaused a massive amount of global instability that impacts European lives.
I also heavily disagree that incentives in EU are not different from the USA. The USA is an oligarchic government with pro-corporate politic parties. This is not the case in the EU. Not too mention workers in the EU often live better lives than workers in the USA.
Hard to not see how the incentives are completely unaligned. I mean FFS the USA made a very credible threat to invade Greenland, so credible that they were preparing for an invasion. An invasion started by your "ally."
That may all be true.
However it seems odd to not follow your ending paragraph with more circumspection re the earlier ones.
If we stipulate that the USA is ending a trend of relative reliability and stability and as such constitutes more of a risk to Europe - including invasion of Greenland - why would we assume from this a stability in European regulatory regimes?
You don't think changes in the United States portend changes on the European continent? Do you imagine the USA descends into apocalypse while Europe remains unchanged? Will the incentives that push the American government to threaten "digital sovereignty" not loom in a Europe that has to increasingly face a more dangerous (given your own premises) world alone?
Yes, the current American administration is a disgrace. That is quite obvious and no achievement to point out, as you seem to well know. Don't let that automatically lead to the conclusion that Europe is some sanctuary. That does not logically follow. A relative improvement in conditions may end up being temporary. Caution is warranted. Especially from Americans who follow this "move my infra to Europe" trend without knowing Europe or its conditions with any intimacy.
As I said it's a good idea in principle. But some skepticism and caution is warranted.
> dig ns https://monokai.com
[..] > ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 586 IN SOA a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1778686176 1800 900 604800 900
[..]
Edit for those who don't get it: .com domains are fully dependent on the US.
One of the reasons why a lot of important websites have multiple TLDs.
Damn that is a very good point you make, thank you. I'm about to publish an app and had hosted the API on the .com domain, I'll flip that to the .nl domain
Google Analytics --> Matomo
Matomo charges 22 euros for 50k hits/month.[0] Basically, it's unusable for anything other than a hobby site - especially with the number of crawlers nowadays.
If you self host for free, you're missing basically all of the good parts of web analytics such as funnel analysis as they lock all of those features being paid subs.
[0]https://matomo.org/pricing/
Sorry for the self-promotion, just wanted to mention that I'm actively working on https://vemetric.com and will soon provide a self-hosted version as well. Maybe it's interesting for some of you :)
I actually decided to self host analytics and generated a simple drop in google analytics replacement. People overthink these things. It's a very straightforward analytics API. And if you ingest the data in a good database or metrics engine (I used Elasticsearch), you can query it quite easily.
In my case, my motivation was that I want to use LLMs to query the data with agents. This whole thing was surprisingly easy to setup and a positive thing is that you don't have a scary extra data controller doing shady things with the data.
All the good parts of web analytics doesn't amount to much anyway. Especially if you desire to have a usable site, which includes no cookie popups.
Umami isn't half bad self hosted. Been using it with Docker Compose for a few years now on a LEB and it's working great.
It's not bad but it's a massive resource hog for what it purports to do. Shame that most of the self host analytics use things like typescript or php rather than more performant languages like Go. Speaking of which:
https://github.com/th0th/poeticmetric
Looks interesting but haven't delved in it too much. I do like how I can create specific analytic tracking events without worrying too much about ad blockers but that's hardly unique to Umami.
There's also another interesting analytics open source project whose name I am forgetting. It was written in C or something and was efficient enough to allow free usage or self hosted, it was a simple hit counter I believe.
Or, to plug-in my own solution, you can self-host UXWizz[0], pay once, get all features and also receive support/help with setup/self-hosting and long-term maintenance.
[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com/
Analytics should be self hosted. For any serious business there should never be a reason to use a SaaS product. For SME (including startups) obviously yes. But if you have devops teams then deploy on your own hardware.
Tell that to my Fortune 200 client that I've spent last 3 years migrating dozens of SaaS apps from AWS to GKE for.
i.e. you can't give stuff away for free if you aren't one of the 3 largest companies on the planet
Would you pay $20/month for Hacker News access?
I think it's fair that GA is free and Google gets some benefits from using the data for their ad network.
"some benefits" is really underselling it though.
Yeah just one of the core pillars that enables their unregulated monopoly that brings in billions of pure profit.
Yeah but you're missing the point. Nobody else has the worlds biggest search engine and ad network to allow them to do the same. Others have to charge.
European-based alternative to github : https://codeberg.org/
The hub for european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/
I don't think Codeberg wants to be a GitHub alternative. In particular, I don't think they want to support the use cases of someone hosting a bunch of private repos, or someone hosting commercialized code.
I'll preface this with a statement that as a European I want European alternatives to succeed, and MS-owned GitHub to shrivel and disappear.
But in case anyone from Codeberg reads this, IMO landing and signup pages need a lot of improvements:
> Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting (using Forgejo)
OK, so do I register for Codeberg or Forgejo? Do I need to click through to Forgejo (it's a hyperlink)? Do I care it's Forgejo?
"Software development, but free!" Free is the biggest selling point? Well GitHub is free too. WHY should I sign up?
Why is there no signup email address on the homepage like GitHub?
Why is the Register CTA off to the side, looking like a header instead of a button?
Why no screenshots of the Codeberg (Forgejo?) UI / wowing me with features? (None on the Forgejo homepage either)
Why is the signup behind that Anubis anime girl AND I need to enter a CAPTCHA after passing that?
> Confirm Password
That's extra friction and AIUI an outdated UI practice.
> We are planning to drop the captcha by improving moderation and spam detection. (state: March 2025).
OK...it's been over a year.
> Using Codeberg to spread SEO spam, malware, links to IPTV services ("tvbox") or pirated content will result in an immediate ban with no prior warning.
Too many words, pushing the "Register" button even further down. Just put it in the Terms of Service
Just copy these things from GitHub, it's not that hard. Right now it looks like a conference registration landing page or something
This is a lot of whining over nothing... not everyone wants to copy big tech.
> This website has been temporarily rate limited
Feels a bit ironic... though this website is hosted on Cloudflare Workers so using an American company anyway?
Well this is nice. Apparently I reached some limits (thanks all), and had to pay Cloudflare more. Fair I guess, although some warning would've been nice. Tried multiple payment options multiple times just now and Cloudflare botched every time without giving me an error message. Finally managed to get it through on the 10th time. Please be gentle now :/
That sucks... Bunny CDN served me and others great when it comes to a Cloudflare alternative, if you're looking for an alternative.
I understand the pragmatism with going with CF, but I'd lie if I didn't also say using CF as the front for your entire "European Digital Stack" kind of makes the blog-post feel less authentic compared to my initial impression, because of that.
Oh that's "funny". Where I work we used to pay for cloudflare, then the credit card expired and we didn't notice in time (our bad, for sure), now our account still works fine, just no premium features and all tickets we've made in order to _resume paying them_ have gone unanswered. Big shrug
I want point out the other aspect of that decision to use cloudflare because the content is already public.
If your users are in a sanctioned region or a sanctioned entity it is entirely possible for cloudflare to deny serving them traffic. In a way your website users are still bound to the US policies even if you or your country doesnt approve of those sanctions.
fwiw I've had my site on front page hn a couple of times. It is a completely unoptimized hetzner server running nginx and serving HTML.
computers are _fast_ these days, you're more likely to have an outage from cloudflare than by just skipping it IMO (for basic personal sites, like yours seems to be)
Cloudflare = NSA creation to get around HTTPS
I think it's more likely they just use/abuse it than specifically created it, same as things like google spyware. The NSA's desires and the ad industry are aligned, so its a match made in heaven.
citation?
Have to wait for the next Snowden before you get any citations.
NSA collaborator or not, the mere existence of something like Cloudflare, which also tries to nudge you into skipping internal http/tls and just use that at the front, makes it highly likely that NSA is already deep in their infrastructure, just like they've been in the past for literally any big technology company in the US.
But yeah, zero citations, zero evidence, just based on history and what the goal of the organization is, it's pretty clear what's going on already.
So just conjecture and speculation, then.
Yes, just like expecting the sun to also rise tomorrow is mostly conjecture and speculation since we cannot see into the future, yet.
This is just categorically different and epistemically dishonest. It is, frankly, an embarrassing attempt to defend the fact that you don't actually have any evidence to support the claim that Cloudflare is supposedly an NSA creation beyond "believe me bro, ever heard of PRISM?"
After the snowden revelations, believing otherwise is beyond faith.
Why would they not when they have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
If ya read the article it lists cloudflare as one of the exceptions ;P
Yea I agree
Just a nitpick: 1Password is Canadian (still not European, but not us based, if that’s the issue). I do understand the choice to move all into proton though.
Off topic: that’s a beautiful website
1Password also lets you pick where your data lives - US, Canada or EU. https://support.1password.com/regions/
So do lots of providers. But the US law says if an American has access they can snoop as much as they like wherever the data physically is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Canadian counts as reliable for me ;)
Canadian here. It pains me to say that my country will not keep your data safe from prying eyes, nor safe from sharing and cooperating with USA authorities.
Our legislative trajectory includes mandatory encryption back doors, warrantless access to data, and data retention even when you think you have deleted your data from a provider. Our federal government is only slightly behind the pace of the USA and is cooperating and sharing with them.
https://ccla.org/privacy/coalition-to-mps-scrap-unprecedente...
Recent HN thread on this. (There have been several.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111531
If you're Canadian, write your MP. There are EFF and CCLA templates to help you do that.
Well thanks but it’s the worst of both worlds, neither the European regulations nor US laws, many bills passed recently where law enforcement can tap into any data, so I would not trust that either. Also, highly likely they use US infra like clouds/etc so back to square one.
Hey, thanks for reading and it's great to read your interesting discussions.
Couple of things.
The main reason to move my data to the EU is that I live in the EU and I don't want a few non-EU companies in an unstable political climate have control over it. It's too unpredictable and I rather support companies closer to my jurisdiction.
I know the EU isn't perfect. And my stack is not 100% EU at the moment. I'm a pragmatist and just got down and transitioned the bulk of my services. Always room for improvement.
Some good points: my domain is owned by the US. That's true, but no way around it I guess (I do own the .nl too though).
I should dive deeper into using something else than GitHub / GitLab. Indeed maybe Codeberg / Forgejo.
And Cloudflare proved not to be ideal today (thanks for the hug of death). I still think using Cloudflare is a problem data-wise, because it only handles public data, but I might look at BunnyCDN again to see if they have better limits.
If anyone was annoyed by the site hijacking the mouse pointer, this rule works: "##:style(cursor: auto !important;)"
there is also some janky, cheap feeling lenis-type of scrolling hijacking in place that gets disabled when the viewport is about the size of a phone.
tried to disable it by turning off javascript and the page no longer loads - thus i am completely uninterested in reading this article
thank you. What an annoying site
there is a button in the footer to turn it off.
I like the idea, but I always struggle with the practical side of this.
As a business owner, I don't really care where the company is based on paper if the product is worse, the support is worse, or the ecosystem around it is tiny.
I want better European alternatives, but they need to win on product too.
"Not American" is a decent reason to try something. It is not enough of a reason to keep using it for years.
First time I heard about Mistral, so I went to the site. I first thought their logo is a pixel-art letter M. Then I read that their chatbot/agent is called "Le Chat"... wait a minute, that means something different in French? And then I noticed that the logo can also be seen as a cat head (from the whiskers up). Then I scrolled to the end of the page and saw my suspicion confirmed: https://cms.mistral.ai/assets/920e56ee-25c5-439d-bd31-fbdf5c... . Kudos to the designer(s)!
A french with low exposure to english would pronounce "ChatGPT" with the first "t" silent, and it sounds exactly like "Cat, I farted" in french.
Got a similar stack for my personal stuff, but would probably do the same if I was freelancing and whatnot.
Bunny, UpCloud/Scaleway, Proton, Mistral, self-hosted Gitlab, self-hosted Plausible, had no idea about BugSink so amazing, now I know... and I deploy everything via some form of self-hosted Heroku
Very nice to see this more and more. Recently the German province of Schleswig-Holstei also moved almost their complete stack to European alternatives.
One note: for European payment coverage there is Rootline available. But I have to put up the disclaimer that I work at Rootline.
Did anyone else notice the leading image's caption? Chef's kiss.
Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonym...
As a fellow European who's also working on a similar move, I would just like to note that it is absolutely surreal that we have to consider this.
I wish it was motivated by pure patriotism (give our money to relatively local businesses), but it's motivated by uncertainty, something I wouldn't have expected from the USA in my younger years.
Matomo is nice on low traffic, but when we have a sustained rate of 5-25 logins per second and above things become real slow. Using regexps is really bad when you start having problems, but they are fine on low traffic sites.
So If like it but it is a headache on high traffic sites. If anyone have an easy solution I would gladly accept it.
I have worked with two clients. Both north of 8 million visits a month. Both on matomo. Both self hosted.
If you architect the underlying infra right it still works like a charm. But I admit people need to know what they are doing. I was quite impressed with both infra teams.
But as always, if you do not want tu use auto scaling US cloud based services, you need to enasure you have the right scaling and the necessary technical expertise at hand.
I had no problems either, until we hit peaks. We hit our problems at about 7 million unique logins per month, we do not track visits in the same way. I am not that invested in Matomo and it just costs time for me.
I am not sure how you scale Matomo we could not vertically scale anymore, we never did MySQL clusters because it just was not cost efficient for internal reasons.
Managed a fairly large matomo site in the past. Using queue plugin (https://plugins.matomo.org/QueuedTracking) with Redis Cluster really improves the situation. We actually built a custom plugin with Nginx + Lua to avoid PHP altogether for the tracking part. Scaling ingestion then wasn't the problem, draining the queue was
The tracking was not the issue the problem was report generation with segments. Every segment makes you regenerate all the reports. Tracking part is a problem because you need to split the tracking and report part of you want to have something robust.
Use clickhouse
I am in the US but my daily chat AI is Proton's Lumo+. Adequate, good features, not too expensive. I am near the end of a 1 month experiment using Google's $250/month Ultra AI plan and I wanted to try something different when the Ultra plan ends. I have tried Mistral's Vibe command line coding agent and considered it, but decided on a one month OpenCode + Deepseek v4 experiment.
I understand why Europeans might want to go all in on their own tech stacks, but it might be more strategic to just not get locked in to specific providers. Maybe a mix of European, US, and Asian tech - with a good plan for easy migration.
Nice and helpful article.
Cloudflare is a kinda funny choice to pick to trust, and maybe they'll re-evaluate that soon.
GitLab is overall nice, and I recommended their on-prem product a few years ago, at an AI hardware tech startup with unusual security requirements. Today, I'd still consider GitLab, but I'd first evaluate how Forgejo fits requirements.
I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get a loads of downvotes for this comments, but what is the whole point of this? Let's say in next general election in Germany, AfD would come into power, form a government and Germany decided to break away from EU, and when that destabilizes EU, are you going to move all your stuff back to US?
I’ve also moved all mine to Europe. There are ample alternatives to us-based commercial cloud.
The regulatory environment is different, so it’s worth understanding the ramifications as far as what’s expected of you if you’re operating in a different jurisdiction. It’s nothing that can’t be handled, but some may find they have to care about things they haven’t before
It’s a great exercise for shoring up independence from extractive providers
Maybe I should have AI write up an article too. Honestly, it’s not just rare, it quietly matters
Might want to move your site to a server you own.... site is down due to "rate limits"
Rate limit from Cloudflare, so much for moving to EU Stack :/
They say
> Not everything moved. Cloudflare is a US company, I still use it, and I’m at peace with that.
which you admittedly couldn't read when you complained about it.
That lettermint service looks interesting! I was recently looking for something in that price range that covers both transactional and broadcast emails but couldn't find anything in Europe so I settled on Postmark which has been good, this looks almost identical in features and pricing though.
Same here. I just discovered this and put it in my "check out tonight" folder. I am currently happy using resend. But this looks interesting, especially also for my freelance clients with a focus on EU tech.
A pragmatic article, always nice. I was surprised that gitlab and github was stillton the list. For me moving to self hosted forgejo was one of the easiest transition i had. But i did not have complex CI/CD needs
Choosing between two tech-unfriendly regimes doesn't intrinsically strike me as appealing.
5:30 am PT Open hackernews “Oh look, another post by a European about moving data around arbitrarily” Start my day
The logical thing would be to move everything to HK, China.
Side rant:
"GMail lets you write filters against virtually anything"
GMail inexplicably doesn't let you filter against almost anything in the headers, except the few fields they hand-pick. Which is unfortunate because virtually every piece of political junk spam from one major US party has the same thing in its headers, and I can't filter on it. Presumably the other major US party has similar large vendors but I don't happen to get spam from them at this time.
Nice and succinct article, and the choices seem reasonable and well thought out.
My only question is, what are the selling points that made you choose Lettermint over Scaleway TEM?
Using TEM seemed obvious at first sight, given the fact that you already use Scaleway for object storage and compute.
To be honest I implemented Lettermint before I migrated to Scaleway, so I didn't even look at TEM. At that point I was more than happy though. And I like to support my fellow Dutch startups too.
Every now and then I see similar posts and people move to Proton from Gmail, because it is European. Well, it’s fine if that‘s the only reason you switch, but if you switch because US became weird and lost your trust, you might want to check their CEO‘s comments on political issues.
While Andy Yen supports specific Trump-aligned initiatives for precise goals, such as breaking up Big Tech monopolies (which, btw, Trump won't), this does not mean he will replicate the erratic nature and global loss of trust associated with Trump and his administration.
The Cloud Act is real and transcends any single company. This global erosion of trust highlights deeper concerns: specifically, that US practices have always been coercive. Now, the world is learning and taking action.
All my customers are in US and Canada, so switching to EU will automatically add latency to everything. That's a deal breaker for me, so I end up hosting on DO TOR cloud. At least it's not hosted in US but it is by a US company.
The biggest issue, is that the whole stack keeps being dependent on external nations, as per the companies that actually contribute to FOSS with big money.
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
Then it is Go (Google), Java (Oracle, IBM, Red-Hat), .NET (Microsoft), Rust (Amazon, Microsoft, Google), Typescript (Microsoft), C and C++ (Red-Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Apple Google, ...), and so on.
Using a programming language is not the same as using a service.
I can't seen any reason for this to be "the biggest issue".
Attack vectors and supply chain, every piece of the puzzle matters.
There is no accident that folks like Oxide go through the trouble to control the whole stack, hardware, software, programming language toolchains they are using, only working with vendors that provide them every single documentation and customisation points they need.
Unfortunely we lack an European Oxide.
They use Go and Rust. If Oxide thinks they can keep the supply chain risks of their langiage ecosystems under control, I think the rest of us can too.
This was a good read. Did not feel like theory more like someone actually shipping the change.
This might be too naively non-feature-parity, but in case someone is looking for a European alternative to Notion/Google Docs, we made https://kraa.io/about
I switched to Protonmail a month ago. It is patently inferior to gmail. Every day I get annoyed by some weakness in the UI that google had apparently just always solved without me ever having to think about it. For example, reading long email chains in the proton UI is horrific. I don't know what google did that made it natural to read and proton does so badly, but it is painful to read these long chains of emails. Another example is log emails from my servers are getting grouped together by Proton. Gmail had sepearated the logs into separate emails in a very natural way. These small annoyances add up and I'm not having a fun time right now with proton.
This is actually a pretty interesting observation as GMail, when it first came out, was just as clunky as all the other webmail clients. At the time, everyone was used to Yahoo!, MSN, etc. and Google was the odd one out with their webmail client.
This changed when they were the first folks out there to get a dynamic interface in the browser (some of you may fondly or not so fondly remember the days of DHTML, XMLHTTPRequest, and the like). Fast forward 10 or 15 years and now GMail is the standard by which everything else is measured.
I'm sure there are some things that are objectively better, but a surprising amount of preference comes from familiarity.
I'll never understand why people insist on using web based email.
Just install your favorite desktop + mobile mail apps and you're fine.
If that can't be done with Protonmail, and you want to move your email out of the US, suggest FastMail, based in Australia.
It can be done with proton, or at least it used to be possible (Not sure, didn't check in a while) thanks to their bridge. A small local software you'd run that decrypt everything and provides a local imap server with the decrypted content
Searching email in local mailbox is a constant problem for me.
Nothing really support IMAP search.
Every mua sucks at large mbox file.
-- Edit: I am a happy fastmail user
Thunderbird's search works just fine for me with tens of thousands of mails.
FWIW I use Apple's default Mail apps w/ FastMail IMAP and don't have issues with search.
But I guess you mean search w/o local caching
Is this trend going to boost adoption of K8s on IaaS as a standard for deploying compute over equivalent PaaS solutions?
Nice post. I really was expecting you replace Github/Gitlab with Codeberg.
From Rome to Babylon.
The art on this website is awesome. The Draad series especially
monokai as in monokai pro spectrum vs code theme? that's my goto
The very same - he writes about that elsewhere on the site.
Scaleway is great. Never had any problem. Has an open-source startup program. https://cartes.app proudly runs on Scaleway.
Do you know if it's possible to cap expenses on Scaleway so you don't end up with unexpected charges (due to bandwidth or whatever)? I mean, having your services stopped until the next cycle begins or you decide to pay more. I knew this wasn't possible for Hetzner, for example, but I'm not sure about this one.
Seems like not being compatible with Sentry's agent is a missed opportunity for Appsignal, which I think is the premier EU based (Amsterdam) APM suite at the moment. It sounds like Bugsink is rather barebones in comparison and I bet a quick agentic coding session would make short work of a migration to AppSignal.
Heh, ironic that the link is now "temporarily rate limited" my cloudflare. I can't read the article, but it looks like he did not move everything to europe ;-)
Meanwhile, all european companies, tech or not, big and small, are preparing to make all their business depends on Anthropic or OpenAI...
European companies might prefer hosting open models on Exoscale's dedicated inference platform.
(I work on ops for that product.)
Showed Cloudflare error page "Please check back later - Error 1027" for me for a while, DNS still pointing there... So probably not so European after all!
They acknowledge it in the article.
Great post! Today we just launched an European alternative to Claude Code - Berget Code- https://berget.ai/code
150 euros a month to try it out is a bit rough, although I guess you're aiming for a different market than hobbyists
And how should one mispronounce "Berget"? :)
Headquartered in Stockholm, so "bear-yet" should get you fairly close.
Mirror: https://archive.is/LNYYU — Works for me after switching to reader mode
Stupid question... I guess SSG pages can be hosted for free from Github or Cloudflare. Any EU equivalents of these - with free or dirt-cheap hosting ?
Not a stupid question at all. Hetzner's cheapest cloud server is €4/month, which includes 20TB of egress. Certainly not free, but should be cheap enough for most.
Can’t read the article…
But given how often GitHub and AWS East 1 go down, this is good.
One bad day at Amazon shouldn’t stop Europeans from doing laundry.
The cloud should have been localized from the start.
I do use a lot of EU services. But help me understand what is the hype about moving to EU cloud services? Is it any different? Wasn't internet supposed to break the international borders and bring us together?
A sympathize, but my EU biz bets on US tech. We are in a tricky position now. So every 'Look ma I moved away from US big tech' post triggers me. Details: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/us-against-them
If anyone else is wondering why no content is visible on the page, it's because it requires JavaScript and a WebGL context.
Reader mode works
And also this:
Cloudflare is no fun. How much coal does the steam engine need to serve this site?so the author didnt fully move to an EU stack. still dependent on Cloudflare, the monopoly.
He acknowledges this in the article…
sorry i didnt read the article because of cf at that time..
Yeah trying to move more stuff out of the US too, while simultaneously trying to pick things that don’t follow the stupid unlimited scaling of how much money we can pull out of your wallet model. Two birds with one stone.
There are definitely technical gaps though. eg bunny still uses one unified api key. CF I can lock to an IP and set granular permissions
> Bugsink
Huh! Interesting to see another one of these. I helped get GlitchTip off the ground awhile back. Might be worth evaluating as another self-hosted, drop-in Sentry replacement.
I try to avoid Chinese, Russian and American corporations as much as i could
Meanwhile, we here in Europe move our stacks over to other continents or at least ourside of the EU to workaround the crazy EU regulation nonsense ;) We live in crazy times my friends...
If you're looking for a Twillio and Elevenlabs replacement, I am working on that too: https://github.com/codingjoe/VoIP
I have several small SaaS apps running on Rended and Railway. I would like to host them in EU. Wondering if there are similar "managed" PaaS options here. I found none.
I wonder if the author considered moving payment processing to Adyen from Stripe? They're also EU-based and a bit more... well known? I liked integrating with them in the past.
Scaleway has introduced Edge services recently: https://www.scaleway.com/en/edge-services/
No ddos protection yet.
I've been very happy with scaleway for many years yes. I can recommend them. Much more professional than OVH and Hetzner too.
This is really cool, just for curiosity though is Stripe not considered EU anymore?
I know it was created in Ireland and didn't hear anything about it changing ?
Irish here, it was never EU or Irish. The Collisons are Irish but Stripe is an American company. The profits are ultimately repatriated to the United States.
Ah I see, don't know where I got the impression they were setup in Ireland! Thanks for the info though.
One of my friends made fremforge.com (an EU-sovereign CI/CD with Git included). It's currently in closed beta but goes live next week (tm). It is built upon Forgejo and EU-based services using T-Cloud as the underlying hyperscaler. Have a look! I don't make any money from it, by the way. And yes, it will cost a little bit, but rest assured: because you are paying for it, you will not be the product.
Proton Mail not supporting filters for message bodies is brutal, I understand why they don't do it but that really lowers its usability for me. Bummer.
Off-topic: Oof, I like the Monokai theme very much but that cursor on the author's website… not so much. It is terribly laggy.
See also the Finnish alternative https://upcloud.com/ I also switched from DigitalOcean and have found UpCloud very good for my purposes.
Since you are already in the migration process, should’ve migrated to self hosting instead, full independence and control, Europe isn’t that different from US, they just have few extra steps on how to handle your data. Self hosting is literally a weekend project once you have bought the equipment (or just use an old pc with hdds), and they are not expensive either, and you can even host stuff for your friends and family too. Maintenance is minimal as well, you can automate few cron jobs in proxmox and enable backups (plus 3 2 1 rule). Your data is in front of you, all yours, you don’t need permission to delete or access that, you don’t need to become a lawyer and read terms and laws, you don’t to call support for whatever either.
Temporarily rate limited ... By CloudFlare?
lol. true
given the article contents, this is a fair criticism
TrainingPeaks -> Tredict I do not miss anything. Opposite is the case.
Sorry to bring it to you folks, but this is not how you build a competitive industry. You put properly though-through legislation in place if you want EU to be competitive with US and China. Not regulations, for f sake.
china-based cloud providers would be perfect for me, many offer private sla, no data retention, and they have everything you could want.
sounds basic but the problem for me is that the internet law in china is very restrictive.
on top of that, in the uk and in china, the government will lock you in a cage unless you give them the encryption keys.
so if i was using alibaba cloud, i would have to play hopscotch trying not to tread on various legal landmines and it's not so attractive for me.
Honestly not everyone wants and needs a EU that can go head to head with the US and China. The markets there follow different philosophies: one is the wild west of free markets to the extreme and the other fully centralised.
I personally want a sane, stable and consumer-friendly market, no unicorns but strong consumer laws and enforcement against mispractice of businesses towards people and the environment. We are far from it but I think the EU is the closest to an entity acting like that and being predictable.
The US chases the dollars at all costs and China similar but depending on the party lines of the decade.
This is totally fine. Just don't expect that it will help the industry in EU. If we want to help, we need to push the politians.
I tried scaleway about 7 or 8 years ago and it was still pretty rough. And setting up with them required multiple trips to government portals to get id documents they would accept. Being European, they don't know how to scan the bar code on the back of US driver's licenses. It was a major PITA getting them to understand that people will sometimes change their names after they get married (my passport and birth certificate have different names and I had to dhl them a notarized copy of my name change order.)
So... Digital sovereignty is cool and all, but Scaleway is taking "Know Your Customer" seriously.
not the domain name :)
A .com domain is not exclusive to the United States
Unfortunately, it is.
Unless you're implying that Verisign isn't a US company, just because .com has become the conventional domain for businesses worldwide doesn't change the fact that it's US-based. Similarly, the EU's widespread adoption of Microsoft Office doesn't make it any less American.
EDIT: That was unpopular. Why?
It is not
Source: own multiple, via EU registrar
(Edit: Parent was edited after reply - parent statement is now correct)
Registering a .com through a EU-based registrar doesn't change anything.
Verisign, the organisation that actually controls the .com top-level domain, is a US company and operates under US jurisdiction.
Where you purchase the domain from is irrelevant.
That… is true - thanks for editing your comment to clarify
The initial thread read like “.com domains are exclusive to US” which they of course aren’t
It's a bit like .gov and .edu; technically exclusive to the US. The difference is that .com and .org were opened up for anyone to purchase.
And it goes deeper than just intent: .com was literally administered under a US government contract for decades, with Verisign only ending up in control because they acquired the company that held that government contract.
So while anyone can buy a .com today, the infrastructure and oversight have always been firmly American.
you do not really own a domain
I am not running a company, just a household but this article speaks to me. I have given this topic plenty of thought in the past year as I have a growing unease with large American tech firms and how they use data. These are some of my setups (in the spirit of the article)
I have also rid myself of Google Analytics for a personal website. Replaced with a local solution that parses logs and builds reports that give me quite a bit of information. Its a more ethical type of analytics leaving no cookies behind and no trackers at all. All info is from the web server logs, you can grok quite a bit of insight from this alone.
Email is the biggest challenge, I have mapped out the entire migration steps for Google Workspace to Proton but have not yet pulled the trigger. The main thing is coordination with the rest of my family who use the domain for their email as well, they don't share my obsession with "digital sovereignty" so there is some negotiation around time tables :-) The Proton family plan will cut the bill in about half.
Password management --> KeepassXC with db on local nas. For personal use I feel you can't beat self hosted for password management.
Compute, Digital Ocean I continue to use and has servers in Toronto which works for me geographically. It's very low down my list of migration plans, they just work and they have treated me pretty good over the years.
Storage all self hosted (ownCloud and Openmediavault). Are they the best options, maybe not but they just work. No cloud based storage at all (Google/Apple etc etc). If I ever throw something out there it is gpg encrypted).
Offsite backups, two local copies to seperate drives (dejadup) on my NAS and offsite storage.
There are still some other services I need to consider. I do have Claude Pro. I run local LLM's for a lot of stuff with OpenwebUI but its not a full replacement.
CDN - Also use Cloudflare free tier. Have to give it more thought, it just works so well.
DNS is fully self hosted using dns-crypt-proxy / dnssec to Quad9 and Mullvad DNS. Works great. I actually blackhole any hits to google dns at the router, media and iot devices love to ignore your dns settings.
Github for code hosting. I know, Microsoft, but it works and is not a hill I am willing to die on just yet.
Photos self hosted with Immich on Proxmox. It's been pretty solid.
VPN, Wireguard to the home and have also integrated Tailscale for some things, which has been handy for extending connectivity and supporting my dad in a different city. Apparently they are based in Canada so that is a bonus. I use the free tier for now but am considering the paid version just to support them.
Router and wireless access points all on the latest Openwrt with consumer grade equipment, some of which I picked up used for like 20 bucks. Allows me to have home, guest, media and iot vlans for proper network segregation. Is it overkill? 10 years ago maybe but today I would not run any other way.
Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.
Everyone talks about Proton, but I've used Tuta.com for years (no vested interest) and it works fine
Looks solid, I had never even heard of them.
> This website has been temporarily rate limited
Did he move also the CDN stack? :)
When reading the docs of quite a few payment processors (for a simple cart check out) Mollie was quite hilarious. I kept thinking "this is it? This is all I need to do??" Then the masochist api's are also available.
And a serious lack of "dear customer, we are keeping all of your money for reasons we wont get into, screw you and your customers, you have no further questions." Which I consider a killer feature.
When AI is used to generate one picture, like in TFA, it's acceptable if the picture is nice enough. YMMV but although I'm usually not a fan of the AI-generated pics used to illustrate everything now, I dig the AI-generated picture in TFA.
I own the domain govern.eu
I didn‘t yet have a good idea on how to utilize it, open to ideas.
Ugh gitlab instead of forgejo - no credibility.
Also... yeah put all your passwords on the cloud. Sounds like a good idea.
Doing the same! The US is rapidly getting worse and worse
China has a lot more infrastructure than the EU.
Why not move there?
They're unfree and not great at service offerings for foreigners?
> They're unfree
As opposed to the subjects of the EU regime?
Why not Russia or perhaps North Korea?
Depending on who is my software for I host either on my own premises or Hetzner / OVH. Do it for many years already and no cloudy headaches
Did he drive home in a BYD EV after that?
Small print: With exceptions
Why are there exceptions for Anthropic, GitHub and GitLab?
> Anthropic is a US company...But it satisfies something else, the sense that the organization building the thing has given serious thought to what it’s building and why.
This reads like a weak excuse. Mistral and Mistral Vibe exists and even if you don't like them, there are many non-US harnesses (Qwen code) that are available.
> GitHub stays in the picture for one specific purpose: public-facing NPM packages and issue tracking for open source software.
First of all Codeberg exists.
Secondly, at this stage relying on NPM and the Java/Typescript ecosystem is quite frankly waiting for a disaster to happen.
This post isn't absolute on moving their digital stack to Europe as it has not one but three exceptions too many.
> The OVHcloud control panel is a labyrinth: the lifecycle rule configuration is buried somewhere in the documentation, and it involves some work in the terminal.
Use OpenTofu/Terraform! Much better than messing with cloud consoles, and then your infrastructure self-documents.
I’d also put out one note to any people outside the EU looking to switch to Mistral or really any service: just because they’re a European company doesn’t mean they’ll follow the GDPR if you don’t live there. Mistral is an example: in their privacy policy, they state that they follow whatever privacy laws exist in your country.
> they state that they follow whatever privacy laws exist in your country
Well, that's kinda obvious - if they want to do business in a country, they have to follow the laws of that country. That doesn't in and of itself mean that they will apply weaker privacy protections if the local laws are less strict than GDPR...
That feeling having total control of your data
While I do think the link highlights are pretty neat, this particular cursor hijack annoys me greatly. Would be nicer to float the link highlights next to the standard cursor.
Using OVH for backups is a crazy choice.
They had a datacenter burn down (in large part because it was fully built using wood) and lost all customer data and did not take any action for 6 months after the incident.
They're just not a serious company.
This is borderline adversarial propaganda.
While the incident did happen, a lot of actions were taken and most of the data was recovered. OVH now also keeps backups even for clients that don't pay for it.
I was hit by that datacenter catastrophe and got my data back almost immediately, in a new VM.
I've been using them for years with little issue (no more than happened on my AWS or Azure accounts, I would say less because it's less of a mess in general).
Stop spreading false rumors.
I was hit by the fire outage too, and the response was... mixed. I was able to start a new VPS in different region the same day and reconfigure everything, but data on the old instance has been lost. They also kept double-billing me for 3 months without me realizing, support had to step in to delete the instance that wasn't showing in admin panel, but kept generating costs. No refund suggested. I ignored it, since it was like $15 overcharge. Also months later the "deleted" instance reappeared and I had to kill it again. Strange stuff.
Aside of that exceptional case - overall they are pretty great and cheap.
> most of the data was recovered
I had a VPS there and all the data was lost. I'd like to see any proof that data was recovered, because that's simply not true.
It's fine to have an unstable backup system, as long as any failures in your backups are uncorrelated with failures in your primary system. And a random datacentre burning down probably isn't correlated with anything else, unless you're foolish enough to host your primary and backup copies in the same building.
All else equal, a more stable backup is of course better, but any backup is better than no backups, so choosing the cheapest possible option is often the best strategy since that's the one that you're the most likely to keep using long-term.
Any source for this? Would love to read up on this.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...
Wooden floors contributed to the fire, they were fire resistant but that only lasts so long. Fire-doors are often the same type of wood.
Thanks a ton. Much appreciated. I am looking for German/EU options so this is highly relevant.
this was 5 years ago. There were many threads on it on HN that may be of interest to you
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Thanks a ton. Greatly appreciated. I am currently evaluation options. So this is relevant to me.
It's important to distinguish between a backup strategy and a backup location. A real backup strategy would involve multiple locations (3-2-1 etc)
I've been dabbling with OVH and it feels very pricey and fragile. Has a very lipstick on a pig approach to whatever they used to be doing before piling into cloud.
Disagree on his characterization of Claude as being much better than OpenAI (a very low bar), esp from a sovereignty perspective. Here's what Anthropic's CEO had to say (from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-full...):
> We are patriotic Americans. We have done everything we have done for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting U.S. national security... We believe in defeating our autocratic adversaries. We believe in defending America.
and
> So, you know, Anthropic actually has been the most lean forward of all the AI companies in working with the U.S. government and working with the U.S. military. We were the first company to, you know, put our models on the classified cloud.
> We were the first company to make custom models for national security purposes. We're deployed across the intelligence community and military for applications like cyber, you know, combat support operations, various things like this. And, you know, the reason we've done this is, you know, I-- I believe that we have to defend our country.
and
> And so we have said to the Department of War that we are okay with all use cases, basically 98% or 99% of the use cases they want to do, except for two that we're concerned about.
Never before in history has a vassal that is this dependent on its patron hated its patron so much.
God help us when the US finally decides that the vast amounts of money it pours down the drain to keep us as its vassal is not worth the squeeze. China and Russia will not be nearly as patient and kind.
America sends a VP to give a speech, which even though it made some politicians cry, was still just words. China will just use us for spare body parts and Russia will drop our people from planes.
America says it really would like Greenland, which it could take with literally zero contest if it wanted, and which it gave back to Europe after Europe had another one if it's many internal meat grinder wars. China and Russia just takes what it wants, they don't ask.
It's really going to suck balls being the punching bag of Russia and China.
Europe is by actual fact completely dysfunctional, constantly getting itself into shit left and right, constantly needing bailouts from America to keep it afloat, and Europeans pretend they are better than Americans. Totally absurd.
> Digital sovereignty sounds like a buzzword until you think
Sure now just think and give me the reason. All these moving to Europe post is getting tiring. Amazon follows the same EU rules, if not more, than Scaleway.
Matt Lakeman writes in one of his blogs that wherever he goes, people tend to love the USA. Except in Europe where he faces a constant storm of criticism. And that was before February. Just like you cannot explain the taste of chocolate to someone, it is hardly possible to explain the mental shift that happened everywhere when the US threatened the EU with military invasion. Like a broken egg this is diplomatic damage that cannot be repaired.
If you sell software and you tell your customers and prospects that everything runs in Europe, by European companies, this instills an enormous amount of trust. Risk averse sectors like manufacturing love this, and it will help you gain customers immediately.
So no, these posts are not tiring to many of us. In fact, we are only at the beginning of the beginning because many of us will be making these migrations. I wish things had run a different course.
> this instills an enormous amount of trust
So you are saying the reason that it is just perceived better?
Even that's quite debatable as I worked in few European companies and has never faced any backlash for choosing US vendor. Biggest European tech companies like Mistral and Klarna use many US vendors like AWS.
Yes. It is both a little funny, and true. Often departments don't even want to start a software project if it is being perceived as "legal and IT are going to have all kinds of opinions on this". When we say everything runs in Europe, by European companies, it actually signals "there will be no problem with GDPR and data sensitivity, and your legal and IT departments won't complain, and the CEO will love it".
Those legal and IT departments of companies favours Microsoft and Amazon, as they are sure they won't get any issue with regulation, or if they do they are the ones who can have better legal representation than a small open source self hosted software.
There is just no reason to believe European companies are any better in data privacy. I signed up for Hetzner once and they asked for my passport. Any American company doing that would be bashed so hard here.
Nah, they are tiring
Second paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Later in the article:
> The act is not limited to companies based in the United States.
> if not more
more mean the US rules that hoover up all the data for the government
Want to state up-front, I am a dual citizen: an EU member and the US, and I live in the US. So I hope this gives my view some credibility as being grounded in the dual perspective.
The sentiment we're seeing in this story/comments and thematically is EU's desire to distance from the US - sure in infrastructure - but more so in identity. Which on the high-level I think is a great goal (ie, Europe should have European identity) but is incredibly risky and I am not sure is well thought out, though I could be wrong.
We can say that since 1950s the US and Europe had a familial relationship with the US being a bit of the parent despite being younger. That manifested in everything from protection (US bases in Europe, NATO), money flow, and culture flow. Since the 1950s, America did not become more European but Europe became more American.
Today we're in the adolescent stage of this familial relationship - Europe wants to move out of the house and perhaps even pay for its own cell-phone plan and that could be wonderful because if that leads to a legitimately stronger and more robust Europe, that's great.
But there's risk. Sometimes when the adolescent moves out of the house, they blossom into the fully manifested version of themselves. Other times they fall in with a bad crowd or fail to deal with their internal problems - and whither. It's easy to tell daddy-US to fuck off, it's much harder to not slide into the clutches of Russia and China in the next decade or two, or to deal with the internal demographic crisis.
What worries me for Europe is that it is trying to "distance" more than its trying to "grow." I don't hear people talk about a Europe that's strong, that leads, that innovates - in other words, the motivation is still about the US (just in a negative sense) not about Europe itself and that's not a good sign.
I still don't sense a true vibe of resurgence coming out of my native continent. Difficult problems you've always had tend to come to a head once you actually move out of your parents house. And while it's great (or at least cute) that you can switch to a European e-mail provider that's very far from what it actually takes to survive and thrive as a country in the long run. Hope it pans out.
Comparing Europe to a teenager wanting to move out of their parents' (US) house is incredibly condescending.
Especially considering that the US is the actual young country being swinged in instability.
You might be right but you are missing a lot of nuance here. For instance, yes, Italy is not thinking about growth, true. But Poland? Poland is all about growth, they just made the list of the richest 20 countries in the world.
The real problem here is that EU as an economic block is much less integrated than people think. Pensions? Not integrated. Health insurance? Partially integrated. Exit taxes? A complete mess. Languages? Try speaking English or German or French in Spain. Etc.
EU has demonstrated that you can have local identities (I feel more Neapolitan than "Italian", for instance) and one economic block. Unfortunately, the economic block integration is not as deep as you might expect.