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MrAlex94 2026-02-20 09:13 UTC link

I’ve found Scaleway really good, I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more often here.

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.

xvilka 2026-02-20 09:13 UTC link

Codeberg would make a better choice if we speak about EU source code forges. And Forgejo instead of Gitea, which is nowadays controversial project.

psychoslave 2026-02-20 09:26 UTC link

Domain TLD is the one administratively completely entangled into USA system while playing a major role on the internet working as it does. ICANN should definitely be an international entity, like UNESCO.

All other points are "mere" technical gaps.

Daegalus 2026-02-20 09:30 UTC link

Great post, I did a similar switch mid last year.

Hetzner was something I already used, so I just doubled down. I have a single OVH instance where I ma playing with Openclaw, but that was because I was having issues with Hetzner that day on their new instance page (was fixed the next day)

I use Bunny for my CDN, I just wish they have the capabilityt to route IPv4 and IPv6 traffic to IPv6 only origins. If your origin 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.

bambax 2026-02-20 09:34 UTC link

Good, honest write up! As users we need to make more efforts to move out of the American ecosystems. Cloudflare is just so convenient to take only one example.

OT, about the finished product (hank.parts): the French translation and tone is a little rude. For one, it uses "tu" instead of "vous", which does have become customary on Social networks but is still a little bit agressive on a regular website. And "bagnole" 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.

Misteur-Z 2026-02-20 09:34 UTC link

* Scaleway is totally painful/scary on data encryption at rest and in transit, does not feel like your infra/data is isolated from other customers

* OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help 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 !

TrackerFF 2026-02-20 09:43 UTC link

Here in Norway (and probably Sweden, too) BankID is a widely used authentication system, and most domestic services will use that as a auth / login. Only "drawback" is that it requires 2FA, which is quite trivial today. But there are still tons of users that want their "login with FB / Google / etc.".

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?

palata 2026-02-20 09:48 UTC link

> Your users expect "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple." You can add email/password and passkeys, but removing social logins entirely is a conversion killer.

I know this is true, but I genuinely don't understand it. I want email/password and passkey, I will always go out of my way to avoid "Sign in with ...". I just don't get why people love this.

raffkede 2026-02-20 09:50 UTC link

I tried buying a domain on OVH and the experience was shitty was forwarded between different versions of the page GB etc and could not finish the checkout

znnajdla 2026-02-20 09:59 UTC link

Thank you for this. I'm in Europe with an established SaaS that's been running in production for years and I've converged on a similar stack (OVHCloud instead of Hetzner). However, I've realized you can stay sovereign and independent in any jurisdiction (not just Europe) just by simplifying your stack and running a few baremetal servers in-house.

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.

deaux 2026-02-20 10:25 UTC link

> Google Ads and Apple's Developer Program. If you want to acquire users and distribute a mobile app, you're paying the toll to Mountain View and Cupertino.

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.

drcongo 2026-02-20 10:31 UTC link

For anyone looking for non-US transactional email, I found https://mailpace.com via HN a while back and can recommend. Can't remember who the HN user behind it is, but they've done a great job.

piokoch 2026-02-20 11:08 UTC link

All of those considerations are driven by politics, not technical matters. What if in Germany next election will be won by AfD, in France by Lepenists (Jordan Bardella is going for the win in 2027 election). And next US election will be won by Democrats. What's then? Moving back to the USA?

samrus 2026-02-20 11:23 UTC link

Its a really good sign that this worked out at all. And the takeaways are enlightening

- 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

apexalpha 2026-02-20 11:31 UTC link

Cool post, thanks. Though I would want to know how much cheaper Hetzner actually is compared to AWS?

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

thecopy 2026-02-20 11:45 UTC link

Super timely - thank you! Im in the process of moving the entire stack of my SaaS* fully in EU as well. Hetzner bare-metal, Talos k8s, OVH Object Storage for backups, self-hosted (for now) image repo. For now im still on Cloudflare for CDN, but bunny looks interesting. Using GitOps (FluxCD) as deployment strategy enables no dependencies on e.g. GitHub Actions.

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/

fofoz 2026-02-20 13:47 UTC link

What do American colleagues think when they read about this trend among Europeans to abandon their platforms?

s_dev 2026-02-20 13:51 UTC link

Currently migrating from Digital Ocean to Scaleway as well, found this article informative.

To assist others:

https://european-alternatives.eu/

gethly 2026-02-20 16:25 UTC link

I've built gethly.com entirely on my own VPSs, so i was concerned only with VPS providers. People actually might not know that Europe has orders of magnitude more developed IT infrastructure than USA, or China(Asia is actually quite a joke). For every one VPS provider in North America, Europe has 10. Not only that but there are all necessary services one might need - cdn, domains, dns, storage, payments... nothing is missing. I don't see why people think they "need" american companies, except the big three of cloud providers with their gazillion useless services. But 99% of projects don't really need cloud services at all.

tucnak 2026-02-20 16:27 UTC link

Truth be told if you're a European business, U.S. cloud providers weren't a good deal for a long time. Not since the advent of NVMe's and cheap 100G NIC's, well, that's for sure. Let's have a look at AWS R8 class, which is their most recent native instance type with real, modern I/O. Now, these are ostensibly powered by AWS Nitro 6th-gen networking, which is a 600G NIC. However, if you fancy NVMe drives (R8gd) which you do normally, you won't be getting more than 50G full-duplex. If you want to hit 100G+, you will need R8gn instances which don't offer ANY storage. So if your idea of data engineering is not calling from the 90s, well, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place mate!

Good news is you can get PCIe 5.0 servers, I/O gear, and host it yourself for a mere fraction of semi-capable AWS bill.

Bad news it doesn't matter if you don't get enough uplink bandwidth, no control over the routing table in the core routing infrastructure leading up to your WAN, or actual routers capable of hardware-filtering 100 gigabits worth of line rate per link. And you will need all these things if you want to at least try and match what Cloudflare/Cloudfront is doing from routing standpoint. (It will be much harder though to match them from the CDN standpoint...) DDoS protection is overrated, but it's not for reasons people commonly think.