Hetzner was something I already used, so I just doubled down. I have a single OVH instance where I ma playing with Openclaw, but that was because I was having issues with Hetzner that day on their new instance page (was fixed the next day)
I use Bunny for my CDN, I just wish they have the capabilityt to route IPv4 and IPv6 traffic to IPv6 only origins. If your origin doesn't have IPv4, it wont route IPv4 to an IPv6 origin. Something Cloudflare could do. Still a shame its not a high priority.
For Domains, I am still on porkbun, but i have like 20 domains, and moving them to EU registrars would be pricey. I will do it, just not looking forward to it. Also there are few registrars tht handle all the TLDs i have, nothing like Porkbun. I use dot.bs to optimize my registrars and keep track of them.
I self-host a lot, but I haven't done github. I have a Forgejo instance with working CI/CD, but there are some painpoints mirroring 100s of repos and updating PATs. Also I minimize how much critical infra I host. I do it as my day job. Don't want to do it so much at home, and I still do some between NAS and self-hosted services I do run.
I do plan to try out Hanko and Nebius, those sound good. and Hit up scaleway to see if there is stuff I want to use there. I know Scaleway can be pricey.
Also no pricing and a "Talk to sales" only link. Which usually means super expensive, or B2B only. I pay like 10 cents a month on Bunny something
I used to work for a business in a pretty competitive area, where tactics like fake DMCA requests and abuse cases are routinely used to attempt to take down information, be it from Google, or from the CDN/hosting provider. While at first Bunny support seemed understanding of it, later they unceremoniously blocked the account on the basis of too many complaints having been filed, despite all of them being responded to in due time and being proven false.
OTOH, their support staff would respond lightning-fast, which was a breath of fresh air compared to other CDNs we used before.
I could see myself using Bunny for personal projects, or some non-vital business, but probably not for anything with lots of competition.
for anything DMCA heavy maybe just buying dedicated servers or something instead could work?
Just buy a few Mac Studios and run them in-house with power supply backup and networking redundancy and you're good to go to serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers. You don't need VMs: a single Mac Studio gets you 2–4x the power of m7i.2xlarge on AWS, and pays for itself within a few months of AWS bills. You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs (an unofficial Apple partner). You get free S3-compatible object storage with zero ongoing storage costs with MinIO (yes it's redundant even if you lose a server, and your hosting provider can't hold your data hostage by charging for egress). Postgres runs like a beast and is incredibly easy to setup - you get zero latency DB because it runs on the same machine, has access to lots of RAM and you're not paying per-GB or per-core. Managed databases are a scam. You don't need an Auth provider, just do passkeys yourself. And the great thing about Apple Silicon hardware is that it is amazingly quiet, reliable, and efficient - you can do thing like run headless browsers 3x faster and cheaper than on standard server hardware because of the unified memory and GPU acceleration, so you're not paying for CI/CD compute by-the-minute or headless browsers either.
This entire stack could give you computing power equivalent to a 25k euro/month AWS bill for the cost of electricity (same electricity cost as running a few fridges 24/7) plus about 50k euros one-time to set it up (about 4 Mac Studios). And yes, it's redundant, scalable, and even faster (in terms of per-request latency) than standard AWS/GCP cloud bloat. Not only is it cheaper and you own everything, but your app will work faster because all services are local (DB, Redis cache, SSD, etc.) without any VM overhead, shared cores, or noisy neighbours.
I fail to see the point of this when the system you've to decided to run "yourself" is entirely owned and dependent on another American company.
With this setup if 1 or 2 Mac Studios fail (or need to be restarted for updates) everything just keeps running smoothly with no customer impact. It also helps that the app itself is on the Elixir BEAM (Phoenix) so everything "just works" across all machines.
You should probably reconsider going with it in 2026 unless you're fine with their new (non -opensource) offering. It still has a "free" license, so it might still be an option depending on your priorities.
But there are alternatives around, some being arguably much easier to run/maintain for small deployments like this.
Only if you have physical offices and staff in every jurisdiction you're serving.
Yes, but not where my customers live. The whole point of "sovereignty" is to serve customers from a location that is bound by the laws of _their_ jurisdiction, not mine.
It matters who can physically take control of the servers. It matters where the encryption keys are stored. The storage and processing location also matters for compliance with data residency laws.
But it's not the only thing I mentioned. Having physical offices and staff in a jurisdiction usually goes along with setting up some sort of legal and taxable entity that has personally responsible directors.
The whole issue is very complicated.
I, too, once believed this. Then I had the displeasure of watching a $10,000 server fail during Christmas travel (about 20 years ago now). A single RAID drive failed. Then, during the rebuild, a second drive failed. Then the RAID controller itself failed catastrophically, losing all the RAID volume metadata. When we restored from backup, we discovered that the sysadmin who had just quit a few weeks before had lied to us about the backup system, and we had no backups.
This is the sort of black swan event that happens every 5-10 years. It's an unusually bad event, even by black swan standards, but stuff like this happens.
The fundamental problem of self-hosted databases is that you test the happy path every day, but you only test true disaster recovery every 5-10 years. And in practice, this means that disaster recovery will usually fail.
With a managed database service, most of what you're paying goes to making sure that disaster recovery works. And in my experience, it does. I've seen RDS database servers fail catastrophically, and completely rebuild in under 15 minutes with virtually no data loss, with almost no human intervention at all.
If you care about your customers' data, I think that a reputable managed database is the right move until roughly the point that you can pay for a full time database administrator. At that point, sure, roll your own. But do regular disaster recovery tests, lest you discover that a recently departed DBA has been lying to you.
While I definitely concur with your conclusions re VMs and GCP hosting overhead, did you benchmark a container based setup in GKE or similar?
You'll need business internet plans with redundancy and based on locations that might be prohibitively expensive. Some startups might even require their own AS numbers.
Also the connectivity to the data centers or cloud infra like WAF , CDNs etc will be definitely worse compared to cloud instances. Then comes firewalls, their configuration and their redundancy.
These things will matter if you're serious about your SaaS.You could definitely co-locate, but that's another cost, then comes the redundancy of everything, from servers, to disks to network (routers and switches etc).
I personally believe that modern hardware is pretty reliable and doesn't need redundancy in every layer, but most people won't agree with and when startups have enough money, this doesn't matter to them.
I think the only reason the common public is unable to start SaaS is handling and managing these problems. Redundancy costs a lot. And many startups don't want to deal with it even if it'll help them in long run. They just gather enough cash and throw at the overlords.
I do hope that the general infra should improve so that can properly host their own.
Nevertheless I'm still trying to start something in SaaS space and self host from my home...
>.. serve more than 10k - 100k requests/second which is good enough to serve a million customers.
What is your network connectivity like for this setup? Presumably you operate in a building capable of giving you fiber, with a fixed IP, or something like that?
That is not really a rarity these days. I have symmetrical gigabit fibre with a fixed IP here in a Spanish farmhouse 45 minutes from the nearest population centre
I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.
I also avoid it because I'm concerned about being over-reliant on google (what if they close my account?) and I know how to use a password manager, but I easily understand how 90-99% of the population doesn't care enough and goes the low-friction route.
I work on auth for a European startup and this is the case.
What surprises me is that if they cannot do it, they will just leave. The post says it is a "conversion killer".
Even absent the above. Imagine a signup flow. I can either click <Sign Up With Google> or I can go through a manual flow with input fields. The former is much faster than the latter. It surprises you people choose the path of least resistance?
What surprises me is that it is a "conversion killer". So if you ask people to create an account, it's sooooo very hard for them that they will just leave. And spend the next 30 minutes scrolling TikTok, I guess?
How is this low friction to manually copy/paste a code from email as opposed to allow a password manager to log me in automatically?! This kind of authentication is a stupid current trend I hate the most TBH.
Thanks for your insight. Outside of being a consumer, and as a security engineer one who appreciates things like passwordless, my experience comes from my employers passwordless rollout. The sentiment is broadly positive, but we would veer to a technical user base, and sentiment misses the nuance you brought up.
So no, I may not leave, but each tiny bit of friction increases the possibility of abandonment. From the perspective of conversion, abandonment is the same as "just leaving".
In fact a decent % of people stops shopping on your site if there's a few ms lag.
At every step a few percent of revenue is lost your competitor takes in.
I wonder if there will ever come a day where the average HN user actually understands how normal people use technology.
Just observe anyone in your social circle that does not "care" about technology and you'll see their reaction to a login prompt when trying, not rarely under time pressure, to access a service they haven't used for a while.
They will sigh, maybe roll their eyes. And who can blame them? The same goes for registering to a new service. Normal people don't use password managers, they don't have Bitwarden with auto-fill, nor do they ever "generate" passwords.
"Sign in with..." offers them a way out of a frustrating experience, it's the device telling them "Hey, would you just like to use this thing you're already logged into instead?" -- yes, obviously they would like that.
Well, I wouldn't say I don't understand it. If someone uses their smartphone as a hammer, regularly break it and regularly buy a new smartphone, I understand what they are doing. I just don't understand why they are doing it, I guess?
In this case, the post says that it's a conversion killer. So people are so damn lazy that if they can't click on "share the information with Google", they will just leave.
If you use e-mail and password with a good password manager, that runs locally on your device and generate good random passwords, it is unlikely you will end up on haveibeenpwned, and even if one website does shit, the blast radius is only one account on one website.
Apparently it has not been working without me noticing it?
Before inevitable "what if your password manager is hacked...," what if your google account is hacked / banned?
(I'm saying this from the perspective of "regular people don't want to be inconvenienced like that, obviously you should use an external password manager for security)
For one thing running on bare-metal @ Hetzner is insane value for money versus GCP GKE. Im a third of the running costs and get ~50x resources.
The only aspect im struggling with is full-disk encryption. Although customer data is still encrypred with envelope encryption in the database, i want to migrate to fully encrypted disks (LUKS + TPM) sooner rather than later. If anyone has any resources and/or experience with this, please let know :)
* Gatana AI MCP gateway: https://www.gatana.ai/
If it matters, I didn’t go to them because they were specifically an EU org either - when Packet became Equinix Metal and then that got shut down, SCW were the most equivalent in terms of cost / hardware specifications and I often used them in parallel when Packet was still around so as to not have all my eggs in one basket.
But really, I wonder why it's not used more ? Price are maybe a bit high for some things ?
With Hetzner now for several years without incident.
OT, about the finished product (hank.parts): the French translation and tone is a little rude. For one, it uses "tu" instead of "vous", which does have become customary on Social networks but is still a little bit agressive on a regular website. And "bagnole" or "balance une photo" is more than casual.
Maybe the target are young people but I wouldn't bet on it. Average car ownership in Europe is 53, and 55 in France. Share of new vehicle registrations by adults aged 18-34 is below 10% in Europe.
My two cents.
I wouldn't trust this website.
It comes across as influencer speech targeted to edgy young people with a touch of "how do you do, fellow kids?".
Pretty sure a modern LLM would yield a better one.
It should be "Pronto a trovare il tuo ricambio?", not "Pronto a Trovare il Tuo Ricambio?".
* OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help big companies going in, they are going somewhere on the SaaS
On most European cloud providers I feel like IAM is crap: workload identity is almost non-existent, API keys management is usually hellish. Same goes for encryption/isolation. I want to hear more technical feedback on most of them, devil is in the details !
Also aren't their data centres all in the Paris area? Do they have any geo-redundancy?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgejo
Also see: https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/
EDIT: HN discussion on the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471
Putting closed source code on github is basically asking them to launder it through LLMs
Now how bulletproof it is in practice will be tested in years to come, I'm sure. But it seems to be using the same model as AWS in China where a local company licenses and operates the software from AWS.
If you said Play Store, then sure, though at least distribution on there is free. But you said Google Ads, which you really do not need to acquire users. Returns on Google Ads were already low, and have only continued getting worse and worse. I'm sure someone here claims to be a magician at it and believes they can get a fantastic RoI out of it, and I'm sure some can. But the huge majority doesn't. It's very much like day trading stocks.
There's a huge number of other, better avenues for paid marketing if you want to do it.
None of my businesses use a "sign in with..." option and I highly doubt it would increase conversions, however the article and many commenters here are adament (based on their experience) that it is integral.
I'm not sure it's day trading per se, I think it's just a lot more relevant to some industries/products than others.
> You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer. Every one of those auth flows hits American servers. The silver lining: Hanko, a German identity provider, handles the auth layer itself, so at least your user management and session handling stay in Europe, even if the OAuth flow touches Google or Apple.
You can at least put "Sign in with Spotify" first before Apple/Google - they have social login. I've even seen apps that have nothing to do with music offer it as an option.
And a last but: If using such auth systems, one would have to account for all the different systems unique to countries.
Maybe some larger EU-specific ID / auth system would make sense?
We definitely need a vendor independent ID system.
A lot of people seem to agree that relying on a handful of too powerful American companies, especially in the ad and social media space, is a terrible idea and running foul of privacy requirements. Remains to be seen if some larger alternatives manage to pop up though. The European landscape is pretty fragmented.
- EU domain registrars might have some bullshit under the hood making the same TLDs more expensive. Might need to investigate - eu needs its own mobile app ecosystem, easy auth, and genAI offerings - - but interested to see why mistral wasnt feasible - other things need to be scaled up to have the community and maturity to function well. This come with time and adoption
Id love if this took off. If more and more people did this
(I am using their official Python client library.)
We looked at StackIT at my company and they were twice as expensive... Which was a bit surprising to me.
I currently rent a full, dedicated AMD Ryzen 5 64GB ram server for €35 a month. Its amazing how much you can actually run on a dedicated machine
All other points are "mere" technical gaps.
And the situation for autorenewal is terrible. At least when using their Spanish site (inwx.es) they cannot do autorenewal billed directly to your credit card or Paypal account, you have to previously add credit to your account "balance" and leave it hanging there until your next renewal.
Somebody mentioned openprovider.com and I'm taking a look because it looks interesting.
EDIT: Looks like it's an American one in the end, oh well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085756
None comes close to AWS, closest comes are messageflow (PL), elasticemail (PL), brevo (FR). Other players like Scaleway TEM (FR) and Lettermint (NL) don't offer non-transactional.
AWS SES does not work for me at all, the sending success rate is really bad.
Does anybody know whether there are any European alternatives for Github that allow you to host private/commercial repositories without using self-hosting?
Hosting and storage: Hetzner and Netcup
Domain: ClouDNS with Failover
Transactional email: Lettermint
CDN: Bunny
Also their web interface doesn't allow you to delete your domain, even if you have not paid yet. So anyone could come and make some account and register a domain, but then not pay and they wouldn't remove it from their systems. The feel of their website is very antiquated and due to not being able to delete your domains, feels buggy.
And then they cry when they lose access to everything because their Google/Apple account got blocked for some obscure violation of ToS.
Their menu has:
- Console
- konsoleH
- Robot
- DNS
When I click into Console I get an additional option called "Website"
I have no idea what Robot and konsoleH are.
Is it a prerequisite if you make a cloud platform to make your offering as confusing as possible?
I was looking to see why they landed on this stack, but there are no alternatives or evaluation criteria listed - given the generated article, I wonder how much of the infra was selected by an LLM.
Regarding the use of LLM for picking infra. The issue I usually have with such task is that they frequently omit things - either from the list of options or the features compared. And depending on my familiarity with the topic, I might never notice, which might steer my decision making into a different direction. Basically a certain bias. Sometimes prompting it to repeat reveals more, but ultimately I end up hitting the search and doing my own research, then I might use the LLM again with now more knolwedge and data. Did you run into this too? What was your process?
[0]: https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/02/19/made-in-europe-...
What the author describe is just a supplier switch still owning next to nothing.
Their direct internet connections rarely go down, but links between servers in their internal network suffer from intermittent failures. if you make your service reliable enough to be able to run on a single node, you could have built a monolith in the first place.
A bit of anecdote from me, as a decades-long Hetzner user: I have personally felt no real impact whatsoever with their internal network suffering from intermittent failures. The downtime incurred by Hetzner admin I've experienced is measured in minutes, in my case over a 10 year period as a customer...
Unless some entity pours hundreds of billions (trillions?) of euros into solving this over multiple decades there will be no way to replace google ads and sign in with google/apple. The AI part seems to be the easiest thing to solve in the list, that says something.
Seems to me like it's mainly regulation. The thing that makes people in China, or Russia, for example, not use Google - isn't that Yandex / Baidu got tons of investments. It is that people can't easily access Google. If the EU decides to pull the switch (or if the US decides to do so), we have enough competence people here to build a search engine.
Moreover, in democracies companies from other countries usually get more say and have more lobbying power. Open market system gives more decision powers to global players. Whereas in China or Russia, if you are not serving the goals of the dictatorial rule, you get ousted permanently without a fear of elections.
Everything you wrote about the open market system is true, except it seems like that system have died over the past year. Europeans understand now that the US isn't a friend.
What's even the entry point? Google and Apple make the devices that everyone uses. Even if you build a service like you suggested, how do you ensure that everyone is using it?
As in, that they won't run away when they see them or that they will all happily use them? If you mean the latter, then it's just false. Also, why do you assume that such product would need to be used worldwide all of a sudden? Having something for the local market would be sufficient to call it a success in this instance. There's an ICC judge who could tell you a thing or two about having a whole digital life on the hook of services from one country, so reducing this dependency is a clear benefit.
Because I'm talking about not running on any American services. Which Americans can do and do all the time. I don't see how we can reach a point where we can one day not include google/apple sign in and not lose a massive number of potential users. Sure it's possible that one day we'll see a "Sign in with EU login" but below it they're always be sign in with google/apple, for a very long time.
"Sign in with LINE" in Japan? Quintillions of Yen were spent.
Also what about AI? Can't solve that with a sub billion euros of investment.
I could say that you cannot run entirely on US technology, because electronics comes from China. Does that mean that we should just strive to move everything to China, so that we only depend on them?
Makes no sense to me.
At least, where "serious" is defined as making enough money that paying AWS $200 a month for $20 a month worth of compute is worth it in exchange for an actual SLA*, paid support, and knowing that even if you drop of the face of the Earth, the account will probably run unfunded months before your users even notice.
I've been bitten by using "quirky" tier-3 providers for savings on projects that really should have just ate the cost of a bigger provider.
(* Yes an SLA is not a magic uptime guarantee, but it creates an expectation which is a lot better than nothing.)