Result: Harder than expected. Not impossible, I’ve done it, but no one talks about the weird friction points that come along the way. This is that post.
why bother?
Data sovereignty, GDPR simplicity, not having your entire business dependent on three American hyperscalers, and let’s be honest, a little stubbornness. I wanted to prove that it could be done. The EU has real infrastructure companies making serious products. They deserve transportation.
heap
After a lot of trial, error and migration headaches I got here.
hetzner Handles the core calculations. Load balancers, VMs, and S3-compliant object storage. The price is almost too good to be true compared to AWS, and the performance is solid too. If you’ve never built a Hetzner box, you’re overpaying for cloud compute.
scaleway Fills in the gaps that Hetzner doesn’t. I use their transactional email (TEM) service, container registry, second S3 bucket for specific workloads, their observability stack, and even their domain registrar. One provider, multiple services, if nothing else it simplifies billing.
bunny.net is the unsung hero of this pile. CDN with distributed storage, DNS, image optimization, WAF and DDoS protection from a company headquartered in Slovenia. Their edge network is really impressive and their dashboard is a pleasure to use. Coming from Cloudflare, I quickly felt at home.
nebius Powers our AI predictions. If you need GPU calculations in Europe without sending a request us-east-1They are one of the few real options.
hanko Handles authentication and identification. A German provider that gives you passkeys, social login and user management without having to reach Auth0 or clerks. More about this in the “Can’t save” section – this doesn’t completely eliminate the US dependency, but it keeps the authentication layer European.
Self-Host: Rancher, my dear
This is where things get fun… and time consuming. I host a surprising amount myself:
- gitiya for source control
- admirable For privacy-friendly analysis
- twenty crm for customer management
- Infisical for secret management
- bugsink for error tracking
All running on Kubernetes, Rancher is like glue that keeps the entire cluster healthy.
Is self-hosting more work than SaaS? obviously. But it does mean that my data stays where I put it, and I’m not at the mercy of any provider’s pricing changes or acquisition drama.
For email, breakdown Keeps things encrypted and European. uptimerobot Watch the monitor so I can sleep.
Transactional emails with competitive pricing. This surprised me. SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun, all make this moderately easy and reasonably cheap.
EU alternatives exist, but it took real effort to find one that matched deliverability, pricing, and developer experience. Scaleway’s TEM works, but the ecosystem is thin. Less templates, less integration, less community knowledge to fall back on if something goes wrong.
Leaving GitHub. If you live in the GitHub ecosystem actions, issues, code review workflow, social graph… moving away feels like leaving the city you’ve lived in for a decade. You know where everything is. Gitia is really excellent, and I recommend it without hesitation for core Git experience. But you will miss the ecosystem. CI/CD pipelines need to be rebuilt. The integration you assume does not exist. muscle memory of gh pr create It takes some time to open the wire.
Domain TLD Pricing. This is simply baffling. Some TLDs cost significantly more when purchased through a European registrar. I’m talking 2-3x markup on extensions that are cheaper everywhere else. I have never found a satisfactory explanation as to why this is. If anyone knows, I’m really curious.
something you can’t realistically avoid
Here’s the honest part. Some things are American and you just have to accept it:
Google Ads and Apple’s Developer Program. If you want to acquire users and distribute mobile apps, you’re paying a toll to Mountain View and Cupertino. There is no European alternative to the App Store or Play Store. It’s just the cost of doing business.
Social login. Your users expect “Sign in with Google” and “Sign in with Apple.”
You can add email/password and passkey, but removing social login completely is a conversion killer. Every single one of those authentication flows affects US servers. The silver lining: Hanko, a German identity provider, handles the Auth layer itself, so at least your user management and session management stays in Europe, even if the OAuth flow touches Google or Apple.
Ai. If you want the cloud, and I really want the cloud, that’s anthropic, that’s America.
The EU AI ecosystem is growing, but for frontier models, the options are mostly American. You can run open-weight models on European estimation providers, but if you want cloud, you’re making a transatlantic API call.
was it worth it?
Yes, with caveats. My infrastructure costs are lower than AWS. My data residency story is clear. I understand my stack deeply because I have to… There is no “just click the AWS button” escape hatch.
But it took longer than I expected. Every service I host myself is a service I maintain.
Every EU provider I’ve chosen has a smaller community, thinner documentation, and fewer StackOverflow (or cloud) answers for when things break at 2am.
If you’re thinking about doing this: Go in with your eyes open. The EU infrastructure ecosystem is real and rapidly maturing. But “Made in EU” is still a choice you have to actively make, not one you can fall into passively. The defaults of the tech industry pull you westward across the Atlantic, and it takes effort to swim against that current.
It’s an effort worth spending. But this is an effort.
If you’re curious to see the finished product, it’s here: hank.parts.
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