Mastodawn

Jan Wildeboer 😷

This is a link to an article written by someone else, not me:

"I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid."

https://www.coinerella.com/made-in-eu-it-was-harder-than-i-thought/

We need more stories like this being shared in the open. You can criticise some parts of the decisions made here, but that's not the point. Someone tried, learned and shares the result. *That's* the point.

#DigitalSovereignty #Cloudless

"Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought.

I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.

Coinerella

Jan Wildeboer 😷

El Reg (that’s how we, the elders of the internet, call The Register) sums it up: „Europe can run your stack perfectly well. It just hasn't quite figured out how to make it the default path yet.“

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/20/ditching_aws_euro_stack/#:~:text=Europe%20can%20run%20your%20stack%20perfectly%20well.%20It%20just%20hasn't%20quite%20figured%20out%20how%20to%20make%20it%20the%20default%20path%20yet.

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

: Attempt to go 'Made in EU' offers big tech escapees a reality check where lower cloud bills come with higher effort

The Register

@jwildeboer
The other problem is humans will go for a one click solution instead of doing the hard yards and actually understanding how the stack works.

@jwildeboer S3-compatible storage is a pain point. A lot of providers Openstack Swift, and its S3-compatibility is abysmal. Ceph is better, but not perfect, and Garage seems great, but you don’t necessarily want to run your own object storage.

Bernd Korz Feb 20

@jwildeboer let us know if we can help with Videohosting! @alugha

@jwildeboer interesting view but was harder meant or more complex more apt? Perhaps, as it is new learning, it being challenging would be expected anyhow.

As more people favour European solutions, the documenation and supoort forums should improve no end.

Thanks for the post.

StealthyTango Feb 20

@jwildeboer That's excellent. I moved one of my clients from AWS to Scaleway. They're very small or it might have been a struggle. At the time the lack of IAC support was a problem. It's definitely getting better. I think if people don't move off US oligarchy cloud services soon they're in for a very rude awakening, so hopefully the market shift will trigger some investments in European sovereign infrastructure.

Metin Seven 🎨Feb 20

@jwildeboer 👍 Some more links related to the subject:

https://graphics.social/@metin/115894842710778497

⠠⠵ avuko Feb 20

“But "Made in EU" is still a choice you have to actively make, not one you can passively fall into.”

Some of this is definitely something we have to work on; preferably together and out in the open.

Some parts of it, will never go away. Part of becoming autonomous means taking back responsibility for choices, and dealing with the resulting friction, as well as being okay with having to negotiate and compromise in working together with others (people and systems).

Precisely because that’s what autonomy means.

ferricoxide Feb 20

@jwildeboer

I sometimes wonder whether, as a US-based person, it might not still make sense to move my vanity-domains to a non-US alternative to Linode (for my needs, a hyperscaler's pricing structure just never makes sense). The idea first popped up when Linode got bought by Akmai, but was really only ever notional. With the fuckery around Trump 2.0, it was a smidge more than just notional ...but still a very low-priority brain-bug.

@ferricoxide @jwildeboer feel the post was aimed at people to 'buy local' but for those in the US, perhaps the message is look for local alternatives to Big Tech rather than buy European, although you'd be most welcome too.

ferricoxide Feb 21

@EF @jwildeboer

My use was as close to "local" — until my provider got acquired — as my specific needs had allowed. In the US, under the current panopticon policies, anything in the US is no longer all that safe (aside from LUKSing my VPS ...which means manually restarting it if it ever stops — like say because of a kernel panic or a VM-move as part of a hypervisor host maintenance outage).

@jwildeboer The page lacks any details whatsoever - especially about roadblocks that popped up and any workarounds. Perphaps good enough for a personal project, but not for an actual business that looks to be "made in EU".

@jwildeboer for AI not trying Mistral? It's EU right?

Renke Meuwese Feb 20

@edthix @jwildeboer OOP explicity says they want Claude. Some people have a personal lock-in for a specific AI already. This is to be expected, and explains why Copilot and Kiro are being pushed on Azure and AWS customers with extreme force: if you can get people used to the flavor of your LLM, they might never want to leave anymore, because they'll talk to their LLM more than to any human probably.

Johannes Bornhold Feb 20

@meuwese there may be a bit more to it. I am experimenting with Mistral since a week or so and did with Claude a good month before that.

There seems to be a relevant capability gap, that's at least my impression so far. I think that this is a bit more than just not being used to the flavor.

The blue cat Feb 20

@jwildeboer @q maybe you can shed some light on this: https://www.coinerella.com/made-in-eu-it-was-harder-than-i-thought/#:~:text=Certain%20TLDs%20cost%20significantly%20more%20when%20purchased%20through%20European%20registrars.?

"Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought.

I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.

Coinerella

@catsith @jwildeboer @q

ooh, I like your text selection anchor! How long has that been a thing?
I've never seen that before in a URL!

@chewie @catsith @jwildeboer @q https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#browser_compatibility

Text fragments - URIs | MDN

Text fragments link directly to specific text in a web page, without requiring the page author to add an ID. They use a special syntax in the URL fragment. This feature lets you create deep links to content that you don't control and may not have IDs associated. It also makes sharing links more useful by directly pointing others to specific words. Browsers may differ in how they draw attention to the linked text—usually, the text is scrolled into view and highlighted with color.

MDN Web Docs

210561 ✨ [Q]Feb 20

@catsith @jwildeboer taxes? lack of volume discounts? not really sure tbh

Carsten Nielsen 🇺🇦 💚 🇪🇺 🇬🇱Feb 20

@jwildeboer And there is a new (but well known) player on the cdn-market: https://www.varnish-cdn.com/

#varnish #varnishcdn #norway

Your sovereign CDN for Europe | Varnish CDN

A fully European-hosted CDN with a free tier and enterprise scaling. Varnish CDN accelerates your websites and APIs across Europe with predictable performance, full data locality and no U.S Cloud Act exposure. Get started in minutes. Start free, scale when ready.

Varnish CDN

Collective Truth Feb 20

@jwildeboer "Leaving GitHub" and "walking away feels like leaving a city you've lived in for a decade."

People I guess really live in GitHub or got used to it... which is fair but scary to feel like it's "leaving a city you've lived in for a decade." - Guess that is for a lot of things and a shakeup can make us better in #moving. Like moving #house / #city...

Simon Hewison Feb 20

@jwildeboer very much depends how simple your system is and the external dependencies. I find that running my own email easier and less fiddling around than outsourcing that, self-hosting plain git is trivial, limiting use of AI to dedicated models in niche use cases rather than massive LLM means it's easier to host.
But then, I've had decades of application hosting and ISP experience so know the pitfalls.

Simon Hewison Feb 20

@jwildeboer also, regarding keeping things simple. if your business model doesn't depend on third party ad placement on your pages or analytics then it makes GDPR a breeze, no cookie banners needed. That in itself is a huge sales conversion benefit if you don't need to interrupt the flow with unnecessary interruptions. #ux #gdpr

@zymurgic how do you make sure that gmail and other big providers accept your emails?

Simon Hewison Feb 20

@ArneBab @jwildeboer
1. Get your outbound IP address ranges from a reputable supplier, ie not lowest-common-denominator mass-market retail ISP. L2TP tunnel them to where your system is hosted from a reputable supplier if you have to.
2. Matching Forward/Reverse DNS.
3. DMARC, DKIM, SPF.
4. Never send anything unsolicited to anyone ever.
5. Only ever email existing customers about updates to their current services or their current orders.
6. Use a domain name that isn't new with good reputation.

@zymurgic thank you!

I’m asking because I know that my old university had a lot of problems with that (sending a newsletter once a year about the yearly conference to a few thousand subscribers and making sure to actually reach them all).
@jwildeboer

Jan Wildeboer 😷

@ArneBab Have your SPF, DKIM, DMARC configured correctly. Configure TLS with Letsencrypt. Don't immediately start with blasting thousands of newsletters or other spammy looking stuff. Have your host and reverse DNS entries configured correctly. That's really all. @zymurgic

Tobias Frech Feb 21

@jwildeboer @ArneBab @zymurgic can confirm, this works surprisingly well and there are tools to help you with setting it up, debugging and monitoring it.

Simon Hewison Feb 21

@TobiasFrech @jwildeboer @ArneBab I use #Exim , which 30 years ago was fantastically easy to set up compared to #sendmail . There's other mail transports that are even easier these days to setup with all the modern tweaks. I've heard good reports about #mailcow but I've not tried it myself.

Theodorus on Mastodon Feb 20

@jwildeboer Great … but why? I also have a startup (used to be an IT guy for 30 years) not thinking about doing this myself. I want to work on my startup … not my IT environment

@jwildeboer How can one be sure that a European hosting company is not a big tech reseller who puts your data on a server in the US?

@jwildeboer good article 👍

The Lack Thereof

Absolutely floored at how little self-hosting is in this mix.

My employers self host basically everything

@jwildeboer @paulk Good steps overall. But why gitea?! The only git provider not hosted on its own software. And known to be hijacked by its governing board to become a for profit company.

Please take a second to read up on that and know that a switch to Forgejo is easy and it’s truly open source and backed by Codeberg.org and Hetzner. Btw, codeberg runs on Forgejo as well.

Greg Harvey 🌍Feb 21

@jwildeboer Nice. I wonder why they didn't use Scaleway for GPU as well... 🤔

Karl Egly Feb 21

@jwildeboer just moved the homelab from ACME by buypass (thanks for the good service!) to ACME by Actalis. Removing the padding from the EAB key was the hardest part. https://european-alternatives.eu/product/actalis-ssl

Actalis SSL | European Alternatives

Actalis is an Italian certification authority

European Alternatives

Daniel 🏳️‍🌈 Jilg

@jwildeboer i wonder what they’ve used as a payment provider, but I’m too lazy to figure it out myself

@daniel @jwildeboer some banks offer merchant accounts which allow you to request credit card payments from your customers. You'll lose out on the nice interface and APIs from Stripe, and you'll be limited in payment options, but it's local*!

* jk, it's still VISA/Mastercard

@jwildeboer great to see these European efforts, tho makes me wonder about other regions as well: Africa, Asia, Americas outside US. I know Europe has a continental governance and regulatory system but seems like it be valuable for these other regions to have digital sovereignty and cross region collaboration could also be beneficial

Ryek Darkener Feb 21

I very much appreciate this realistic approach. It shows what is possible and where are opportunities for European companies – existing or to build.

My little hobby site (see Bio) isn't exactly in the same league, but being a hobby site it's somewhat price sensitive.

Originally it was registered and hosted at a company located in Bulgaria. Their price for the .org domain was 16 EUR + 8 EUR (p.a.) for domain privacy but their hosting on a shared server was very good when taken on a 3-year term. I was paying less than 170 EUR for 3 years all-in.

But this year they upped the hosting price by a factor of 3 ... 🧵 1/3

🧵 2/3

The price increase doubled the price of the 3-year package, so I decided to shop around...

I found a German company, Contabo, offering a small VPS for a bit over 50 EUR per year. Nice. But as the article's author found, European registrars charge a premium a domain under a generic TLD. So mine is now at namecheap (a US company) and costs around 10 USD pa with free protection.

The remaining service that I use is LetsEncrypt for the SSL certs....

🧵 3/3

There are some European alternatives for free SSL certs that I'm going to look into.

The upside of a VPS over shared hosting is the speed and flexibility.

The downside is the server admin. I've learned a lot about server setup over the last 4 weeks. A webserver is fairly easy. Email server less so. And now that my server has been noticed by the "bad guys" I'm learning about fail2ban, nftables etc. to cut down the volume of noise in the logs. All good fun for a hobbyist 🙃

@jwildeboer and that means negotiations with half a dozen companies, making the transfer of data between them secure and safe and having half a dozen admin interfaces and dashboards to look at.
It’s great to see it is possible, but also shows, how far behind all of the providers are compared to the three hyperscalers.