Moving away from US cloud services

&gt; Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected.<p>This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it&#x27;s too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google&#x27;s index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The <i>real</i> takeaway from this is that it&#x27;s currently impossible in any meaningful sense. It feels like there&#x27;s a real opportunity here for European companies to step up and make a big play, but will they? I really, really hope so. I&#x27;d jump ship in a heartbeat if I could.<p>Edit: To be clear, the reasons in brackets were the author&#x27;s, not mine.

A shame that OP recommends Proton. The fact they don&#x27;t support open email protocols like IMAP&#x2F;SMTP without an extremely frustrating proxy setup is what ultimately turned me away from their service. Being able to &quot;just&quot; use a native mail client is pretty much a must.<p>The vendor lock-in from something like Proton feels way worse as a result.<p>Can&#x27;t speak to Proton Pass, but it strikes me as a replacement that seems unnecessary: if Bitwarden is a problem, the server can be selfhosted, something which the OP seems to be familiar with.<p>Some of the others feel of more... questionable issues to have with US cloud services; it&#x27;s hard to find problems with Dockerhub and NPM that aren&#x27;t just <i>general</i> problems with these services&#x2F;the company behind them (mainly NPM). Maybe that&#x27;s just because the public&#x2F;private concern for both of those services is pretty different than the others mentioned here.

Interesting how for a (junior) dinosaur, like me, this was never a problem: I still run my mail, web, nextcloud, xmpp, forgejo, etc server on a former thin client under a cupboard. With a symmetrical fiber 1G connection it&#x27;s been surprisingly reliable.<p>FAQ:<p>Yes, you can run self hosted mail.<p>Yes, it&#x27;s complex.<p>No, it&#x27;s not hard, but it takes time, as it is complex - if you want to understand it. If not, go for something like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maddy.email&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maddy.email&#x2F;</a><p>Yes, I have a fixed IP address with a reverse DNS entry configured.<p>My ISP is zen.co.uk.<p>Yes, I have reverse DNS, DKIM, DMARC, SPF, even mta-sts.<p>No, I&#x27;m not switching from XMPP to Matrix - it&#x27;s too server heavy, XMPP is more client oriented, which is my preference.<p>I know about the UK&#x27;s online safecty act, I used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinesafetyact.co.uk&#x2F;ra_my_self_hosted_single_user_mastodon_instance&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinesafetyact.co.uk&#x2F;ra_my_self_hosted_single_user_...</a> as a template to create mine. I think the act itself is basically useless and just paperwork, but something along it&#x27;s ideas is actually needed.<p>I block many AI crawlers from accessing code and photos, as eg. Claude is so aggressive that it&#x27;s code crawlers makes my system sluggish, and I have no will to let anyone use my photos beyond printing them for their wall as decoration.

Maybe one really needs &#x27;the cloud&#x27; (whatever that is) or the accompanying services, I don&#x27;t know, but I do know that good old webhosting is still around. At least here in The Netherlands. Good for email, good for websites and webapps, good for data storage.<p>There are enough options to choose from the decentralized menu of hosting offerings. Most are cheap enough also, but watch out for the slightly bigger webhosting companies that are taken over one-by-one by some group of investors wanting to play AWS (and upping the prices by 400% or so).

I would like to see a movement more along the lines of &quot;Moving away from cloud services&quot;, not just US services. Our computers are faster than ever, internet bandwidth is not a problem, public IPs affordable. Why not self host when possible?

My problem is that I do not want to replace one centralilzed service with another. I do not see any difference between the US and the EU (or Australia) in handling privacy. Most politicians are super keen on destroying privacy for people, for the &quot;good cause&quot;. There are so many examples of this I lost count. We need strong encryption and true peer-to-peer networks where the connection is going through random routes (impossible to predict) and there is no government controll of any of the nodes it touches.

I find the Proton tools to be a joy to use and I use them for my business. For clients, I can&#x27;t do that to them. Microsoft completely dominates and people just expect to be able to video call, chat, work on docs, etc. MS365 remains incredible value for money and pretty optimal for normies.

The biggest elephants in the room are cloud providers, but I didn&#x27;t find an easy alternative yet (hetzner, ovhcloud). ATM, the idea to the business is sold, that data resides somewhere near by in a datacenter, EU proximity. However, the EU businesses are realising that, well, whole region is at a mercy of one person.

I don&#x27;t know if it migrates CI pipelines as well (which is apparently what prevents the OP from leaving github), but Codeberg has a migration tool to automate the switch from Github (and others) to Codeberg.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.codeberg.org&#x2F;advanced&#x2F;migrating-repos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.codeberg.org&#x2F;advanced&#x2F;migrating-repos&#x2F;</a>

Yeah the last couple weeks has made me wary of anything US based too. Not just privacy but also just overall risk. They’ve suddenly become very erratic in their decision making.<p>Quite hard to untangle it though. So much of the internet is US centric unfortunately. And even if you figure out the first layer of vendors they in turn are likely US reliant too

Very well written and justified.<p>At the end almost everything in life is about interests. It&#x27;s clearly in the best interests of one country, or union of countries, to do their thing and reduce reliance on others.

I was thinking about it today, I could think of an equivalent for EC2, S3, Software defined networking, archival, load balancers etc. But, one thing I could not easily come up with a replacement for is IAM. What would be an equivalent to IAM that a smallish cloud provider could use without building it from scratch?<p>A system that provides roles, policies and granular permissions that can be attached to specific resources like the equivalent of S3 buckets, equivalent of EC3 VMs etc.

I moved from GitHub to self-hosted gitolite. I use a (standard) Makefile in each repo, which my deploy job runs (make test, make build, etc). I use githooks to do various automation.<p>It&#x27;s really not that much different to GH Actions, and not more work. But it&#x27;s much faster, and easier to work with.<p>If you&#x27;re working in a team, then PRs are hard to replace.

Didn&#x27;t see Coolify [0] combined with Hetzner mentioned in the article!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coolify.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coolify.io&#x2F;</a>

Infomaniak is Swiss company and is a very nice alternative to 365. It covers emails, cloud storage and office editors (via OnlyOffice editors), and plenty more services.<p>For source code, BitBucket is provided by Atlassian, which while not European is Australian, so also from a trustworthy country.

On Bitwarden, at least for now, it&#x27;s mostly Open Source … for techies, for the server-side, there&#x27;s Vaultwarden which is easy to self-host and with self-hosting of FOSS software you achieve true data sovereignty.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dani-garcia&#x2F;vaultwarden" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dani-garcia&#x2F;vaultwarden</a><p>I&#x27;m an EU citizen and I worry about the US as well, but we need to be careful about this migration to EU services, as in some areas the European alternatives aren&#x27;t good enough and people will go back to Big Tech, instead of preferring a FOSS solution that happens to have US dependencies.

For the Americans in the room with European customers, this all should be taken very seriously.<p>From our perspective, the US has just declared itself hostile. No organisation their right mind would use a stack dominated by Russian companies, any organisation not considering the risks of having their tech US-based right now is being careless in the extreme.<p>Even if Trump goes away tomorrow, this is a long term issue. America has demonstrated that it&#x27;s an unreliable partner twice now. We can&#x27;t make our planning on the basis of a dice roll for the Whitehouse.

I wonder if shifting to cloud providers in the EU will lead to the rise of giant European cloud companies in both technology and infrastructure, or if this is just a short-term trend.

As a Github alternative you could consider self-hosting Forgejo (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forgejo.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forgejo.org&#x2F;</a>) which is the underlying system powering codeberg (mentioned earlier) and some other public instances (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;forgejo-contrib&#x2F;delightful-forgejo#public-instances" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;forgejo-contrib&#x2F;delightful-forgejo#publ...</a>).<p>As a plus they provide Forgejo Actions (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forgejo.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;latest&#x2F;admin&#x2F;actions&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forgejo.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;latest&#x2F;admin&#x2F;actions&#x2F;</a>) which is pretty much similar to that other Actions, and which should make migrating that much easier. (you could replace the Alpha state Forgejo runner with the Gitea forked act runner -- as they are both essentially act runner forks); or you could run any of the CI&#x2F;CD tools mentioned here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;forgejo-contrib&#x2F;delightful-forgejo#ci-cd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeberg.org&#x2F;forgejo-contrib&#x2F;delightful-forgejo#ci-c...</a>

Since you are switching anyways you could try to adopt local first and that way you make sure you don&#x27;t have yet another cloud dependency ie political dependency.

I am self-hosted, then I don&#x27;t mind clouds, US or not, but... I am fed up with those &quot;clouds&quot; which are closing their eyes on the fact that they are weaponized by hackers, to point I started to think they actually want that, aka wrecking small hosting namely more business for them.<p>Nearly everyday I get a scans&#x2F;hack attempts(script kiddy grade for what I can see...) from some of them, this is seriously annoying and those &#x27;scans&#x2F;hack attempts&#x27; have been usually referenced by security communities, OFTEN FOR MONTHS IF NOT YEARS.<p>No &quot;cloud&quot; is spared: aws, microsoft, google, ucloud.cn (the worst), ovh, etc...<p>On top of that, they are &quot;protecting&quot; &#x27;scanners&#x27; (onyphe&#x2F;stretchoid&#x2F;cyberresilience&#x2F;etc), you know those guys who are scanning(when it is not some kind of script kiddy look-alike hack attempt) the whole internet, that &#x27;for your own good&#x27; with the second line of their website being &#x27;pricing (ahem... scan data)&#x27;. We all know that you do not scan any system without being explicitely asked for unless... military&#x2F;police.... or mob.

I&#x27;d assume that self-hosting is not an option for this user?<p>Otherwise the alternatives would be pretty much a nobrainer for me:<p>Microsoft Office 365 -&gt; Nextcloud Bitwarden -&gt; self-hosted Bitwarden&#x2F;Vaultwarden GitHub -&gt; Sourcehut&#x2F;Codeberg&#x2F;Gitea&#x2F;Forgejo Google search -&gt; Searxng Reddit -&gt; Lemmy Hackernews -&gt; Lobsters Twitter&#x2F;LinkedIn -&gt; Mastodon &#x2F; any Fediverse software

I know this going to offend many but as an outsider, it is heart wrenching to see a foolish, greedy and extremely corrupt property dealer dismantling the greatest empire in the human history, piece by piece from its soft power (VOA, USAID) to its core functions (tempering with science and education) and there&#x27;s no political force in sight that can be of any significance.

&gt; Startpage is owned by a Dutch company which is operated from its headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands, and is a part of System1, a publicly traded company based in the United States.<p>I was hoping Startpage was the successor of startpagina.nl, which I used as a kid in 1995 to &#x27;browse&#x27; the web. One of the oldest Dutch websites that I can remember. Fond memories!

I don&#x27;t like all of his suggestions, like startpage.<p>But I have very good experience with Scaleway, much more so than OVH or Hetzner. Hetzner demanded ID photos for everything. And OVH is a chaos. Scaleway is more like an Amazon type cloud and their support is really good and direct. Also cheaper than Amazon (and without the whole ratmaze of fee structures!)

Man, I bet it feels clean and fresh like stepping out of the shower after playing sport in the sun for hours.

Surprised the author didn&#x27;t realise that the dropdown by login boxes has been supported for some time by BitWarden, and more importantly, the backend is open source so you can run it yourself (there&#x27;s also a third party implementation that&#x27;s even simpler to run yourself).

Is anyone migrating away from microservice architecture back to just big box single monolith blob like back in the 1990s&#x2F;2000s?<p>I really liked using Hetzner and pure metal. The only real hold-back I have from switching from Google is email and doing backups.

&gt; there&#x27;s just no legal compatibility between EU privacy rights and US spying laws.<p>“EU privacy rights” is bold framing considering what’s been going on with Apple: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;uks-demands-apple-break-encryption-emergency-us-all" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;uks-demands-apple-brea...</a><p>Honestly the whole article except the “Wrapping up” section can be skipped and you’ll still end up with mostly the same technical takeaways.

Looks unrealistic to me. Sure, for one guy with lots of energy and know how its possible. Try migrating academia, industry, entire government branches etc. That&#x27;s not gonna be easy.

Europe needs a separate ecosystem to not relay only on US technology.

Even if you try to look at the situation from a detached POV I think you can&#x27;t help but be baffled at how much influence the US is giving up for no apparent reason. It always felt like a house of cards here in Europe - we rely on defense from the US, we store so much of our data there, and almost all of our stuff comes from China or its area of influence.<p>Now there&#x27;s a guy at the top of the US who doesn&#x27;t understand human interactions beyond anger, disgust and mindless loyalty. Or diplomacy beyond simple monetary transactions. He and his rich friend are getting rid of anything they don&#x27;t understand (or that they don&#x27;t understand to be of value to them right now), and apparently that&#x27;s almost everything.<p>We&#x27;re living in interesting times.<p>I wonder what game theorists are doing right now. All I know is that old joke about economists can&#x27;t be true, about blindly assuming that everyone acts in their own best interest. People do factor in stupidity, right? But there must have been limits, and we&#x27;re clearly far beyond those.

One relatively simple thing we&#x27;re missing on the Swedish cloud market is someone offering OIDC SSO, Chat, Video meetings, e-mail, calendar and file sharing.<p>I can&#x27;t even say which European company offers this, Proton maybe?<p>Being a long time open source advocate I think it can be done, but system integration would never be as good as MS or Google.<p>But this simple platform would get a lot of SMB&#x27;s to migrate.

I get decentralized is a thing but maybe &quot;being able to easily migrate my stuff to another service&quot; could be a thing too.

The big problem with non-Google mail services is Google itself that tends to flag mail coming from their domains as spam.

About Bitwarden, i have a setting to use European server when I connect to and register a new account.<p>Wouldn’t it have been easier to just migrate from Bitwarden us server to European server ?<p>Proton pass free tier lack feature compared to Bitwarden.<p>Beside id argue that no cloud is better than European cloud. There is keepass for instance, with syncthing it works pretty well.

When I started in tech, Freedom was key. You put a value in your freedom to run and modify your code.<p>Over time that has not only regressed to just free to run, but not even that - you have to have permission to run your stuff<p>It’s easier to be a vassal. I won’t say good luck though. Live in favour of the king and you’ll be fine. Until the king does something and you get to kiss his ring.

Regarding Startpage: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startpage.com&#x2F;privacy-please&#x2F;startpage-articles&#x2F;startpage-and-privacy-one-group" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startpage.com&#x2F;privacy-please&#x2F;startpage-articles&#x2F;...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210729190016&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.startpage.com&#x2F;index.php?&#x2F;Knowledgebase&#x2F;Article&#x2F;View&#x2F;1275&#x2F;0&#x2F;what-is-startpages-relationship-with-privacy-onesystem1-and-what-does-this-mean-for-my-privacy-protections" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210729190016&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.s...</a><p>The original link is dead for some reason: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.startpage.com&#x2F;index.php?&#x2F;Knowledgebase&#x2F;Article&#x2F;View&#x2F;1275&#x2F;0&#x2F;what-is-startpages-relationship-with-privacy-onesystem1-and-what-does-this-mean-for-my-privacy-protections" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.startpage.com&#x2F;index.php?&#x2F;Knowledgebase&#x2F;Artic...</a><p>TL;DR: Startpage appears owned by an ad company? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bizjournals.com&#x2F;losangeles&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;20&#x2F;system1-raises-270-million-for-consumer-intent.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bizjournals.com&#x2F;losa...</a><p>Could someone explain to me how an ad company and a privacy company work together? Seems like opposing interests?<p>Maybe Ecosia will be a good alternative later on: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ecosia.org&#x2F;eusp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ecosia.org&#x2F;eusp&#x2F;</a><p>Another suggestion would be <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searx.space&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searx.space&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m not sure how all this is going to play out but sooner than later local solutions will be enforced politically.<p>&gt;Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected.<p>So if the AI hype is worth its salt, the transition should at some point become trivial.<p>&quot;Hi Mistral, can you please build a OneDrive replacement? I will host in on my Linux server at OVH. Here is the documentation for OneDrive, make sure that the software works as described in the documentation. Then install it into my server using these credentials and put the client side apps in my Apps folder&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t keep myself but thinking, what will happen when the mighty US tech companies that used to serve the planet get limited to 340M people in the half of the North American continent.<p>So far it was just convenient to have your tech thingies in the USA even if you are just providing a niche service somewhere in south Italy from Montenegro.<p>For years this created a positive feedback loop that fed into the centralization of capital and talent in USA, particularly in the Silicon Valley. It wasn&#x27;t that Americans were writing better for loops than Europeans, it was that the global nature of the tech positioned itself at the place with least resistance and largest resources.<p>Unfortunately this is coming to an end as a political choice by the USA itself, so what&#x27;s next then?<p>The moat of social networks and financial networks can indeed be broken by force if politicians choose to. This brings so much opportunity to non-Americans, it is sad for those who feel like global citizen and integrated with the whole humanity and its pretty much the dream of ant-globalists.

&gt; git repos: too hard<p>I&#x27;ve found OneDev (selfhosted) to be an excellent alternative, unlike others which feel either half-baked or require a lot of configuration&#x2F;maintenance

I think it&#x27;s good that people finally does this but people in EU should&#x27;ve been doing this many years ago when all the news of the surveillance broke out.

For search, Yep by ahrefs is hosted in Singapore, which isn&#x27;t EU but if the goal is just to get out of the US then it could be a good alternative

Self-hosted Gitea instance to replace GitHub<p>Their &quot;Gitea Actions&quot; are based on &quot;GitHub Actions&quot;, you don&#x27;t even need to rewrite your CI Yaml

i dont think its that easy as others pointed out but yes I think it would help to have some strict startups around EU maybe that force companies to comply...but then again, from indie hackers&#x2F;indei makers sides, europe hasnt been too incentivized&#x2F;friendly for&#x2F;to start ups either compared to other parts of the world...I think this is one of the major reasons.

Anyone knows a good github&#x2F;lab alternative that is hosted in Europe? That article scared me of the potential loss of my code.

It’s amazing how much damage two persons (Trump &amp; Musk) can cause to the whole of the US. It’s damage for generations ahead.

At Tech for Palestine, we&#x27;ve been investigating moving off many US based cloud services, with the intent of providing training, guidance, etc, for the broad population on how to do it and where to go.<p>Our main conclusion so far is that many of the platforms that we look at, such as Signal or Protonmail, need serious UX improvements before they can be used by any serious chunk of the population (though for a HN audience, they can mostly put up with it).

I moved my side project websites off of US VPS providers to an old MacBook Air 2015 I had lying around.

What about using data encryption in the cloud and the US spying laws? How is that even compatible?

The problem I see with this article, is that 3 of his chosen options rely on Swiss companies. And Switzerland is most definitely not the EU.<p>For the time being their interest are very much aligned with the EU (and logically so, from a geographical and economic standpoint), but Switzerland also has a history of happily changing sides when their &quot;neutrality&quot; or their financial interests are at stake.<p>Their historical dependency on finance (and their shady practices), combined with a high dependence on US trade, and high financial investments in the US make them particularly vulnerable to economical and financial blackmailing by the US. For a case-in-point, see the particularly weak response (or &quot;diplomatic&quot; response, staying charitable..) of Karin Keller-Sutter to the Trump developments, in a bid to hopefully avoid tariffs.<p>Therefore, companies obeying Swiss laws simply do not offer the same &quot;privacy&quot; guarantee as companies obeying EU law.<p>Secondarily, putting your trust in a company who&#x27;s CEO openly supports the Republican party is, in the current context, very questionable. No matter the Proton PR denials and clean-up attempts after the facts.

Hot take: If the US and EU secret services stop sharing any intel with each other, wouldn’t it be smarter for Europeans to use American services now more than ever? Because even if they’ll get their hands on your nudes, tax docs, or pirated movies, what could they even do with it? If you use an European company on the other hand and some local government wants to fuck you up, it’s much more easier to get their dirty hands onto you, your family, and your friends.

Another interesting European hosting company is Hostinger <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hostinger.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hostinger.com&#x2F;</a>

The formatting actively prevented me from processing more than half the article&#x27;s content but I agree with the premise as far as I was able to get it: if you&#x27;re a EU-based company or individual it&#x27;s a good idea to move away from US cloud services unless you&#x27;re a subsidiary&#x2F;employee of a US company.<p>The legal concern for EU businesses should be self-evident given that EU-US data sharing provisions have been struck down again and again with every replacement inheriting the exact same issues of the one before it. There simply is no way for US-based companies to comply with EU data protection laws while still complying with US laws granting law enforcement and federal agencies warrantless surveillance powers - they&#x27;d actively have to break US laws to comply with the EU laws.<p>That said, this is much more difficult for some things than others.<p>If you&#x27;re building on AWS, there&#x27;s simply no drop-in replacement. Yes, there are EU equivalents in the same category but it&#x27;s very different from &quot;simply&quot; switching between AWS, GCP and Azure.<p>For package registries like NPM, moving away also means abandoning the standard ecosystem. For private packages this may be an option but for public packages at some point you will likely need to involve a US service. GitHub is kinda in the same boat - although alternatives to GitHub exist functionally, GitHub is also a platform for discoverability and ease of access. These platforms act somewhat as monopolies for these purposes simply through the network effect of so many people using them.<p>Even Microsoft 365 (or Google Workspace) can be somewhat difficult to avoid given that so many things simply integrate easily with it compared to whatever company-wide &quot;productivity suite&quot; alternative you might want to use. That&#x27;s without even getting into the quality and compatibility of the tools themselves.<p>What seems far easier and often overlooked are the infinite number of dime-a-dozen SaaS providers: emails, monitoring, realtime, messaging, payments, etc etc. These provide an easy first step for most companies and by adopting these incrementally you can also more easily wean yourself off bulk service offerings like AWS. Of course this comes with the cost of a diverse stack: you can&#x27;t simply hire an AWS certified devops guy and expect him to know how every single service works, on the contrary none of your folks might know how a given new service they need to add works.<p>Another consideration that&#x27;s becoming increasingly relevant is the (un-?)intentional vendor lock-in imposed by AI assistants: the LLM your devs or management is using might be able to generate a SOA app built on AWS or Azure but it will likely be less helpful integrating with a EU-based specialized service provider with a fraction of the userbase. Not to mention the AI assistant itself probably runs on US-owned infrastructure and is likely provided by a US-based company.

Proton? Really?[1] Expressing personal opinions without thinking beforehand how they would land, when you&#x27;re a CEO, is one thing, but the hamfisted attempts at clarification and then the PR team&#x27;s scrambling afterwards to delete everything was a questionable look at best. Not inspiring confidence.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;28&#x2F;proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;28&#x2F;proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...</a>

Privacy rights in the EU are being eroded as we speak. Unless people there get off their high horse, they&#x27;ll succumb to the same level of authoritarianism and surveillance as in the states.<p>Also, sorry, but the idea that EU countries are in any position to build a serious hyperscaler is pure fiction. Growth, funding, risk, innovation - those are alien concepts to European entrepreneurs.

Hetzner might get a lot of love here but it&#x27;s another service that treats protonmail users as second class citizens since they ask for ID. I would avoid them just because of this.

&gt;At the very least, think twice before signing up for new US services. Consider European services instead.<p>To be clear, this Europe?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.europol.europa.eu&#x2F;media-press&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;european-police-chiefs-call-for-industry-and-governments-to-take-action-against-end-to-end-encryption-roll-out" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.europol.europa.eu&#x2F;media-press&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;euro...</a>

Hey so I’m pretty sure you can host your own business mail for free these days without a static IP. This is basically how it would go:<p>Cloudflare Tunnel installed on your box (free)<p>Cloudflare Email Worker connected to your domain which writes emails to a KV store (generous free tiers)<p>Cloudflare Worker that downloads the emails from the KV store and uses Worker TCP sockets to send it to your mail server over the tunnel via a TCP port ie 25000 (CF blocks 25)<p>For sending mail in blue, local mail server uses smtp2go or Azure Communication Services.<p>I’ve pretty much convinced that a cheap Synology rack is the best way to do this because it replaces Azure ID (Synology SSO) and Exchange (Synology Mail) which self hosted non-SaaS in the one appliance, it gets security updates, and it has a easy web interface for setting everything up.<p>Haven’t managed to write the Cloudflare worker code yet, but found this guys repo and he’s done pretty much all the heavy lifting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Sh4yy&#x2F;cloudflare-email" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Sh4yy&#x2F;cloudflare-email</a>