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.
When I decided to build my startup on European infrastructure, I thought it would be a straightforward swap. Ditch AWS, pick some EU providers, done. How hard could it be?
Turns out: harder than expected. Not impossible, I did it, but nobody talks about the weird friction points you hit along the way. This is that post.
Why bother?
Data sovereignty, GDPR simplicity, not having your entire business dependent on three American hyperscalers, and honestly, a bit of stubbornness. I wanted to prove it could be done. The EU has real infrastructure companies building serious products. They deserve the traffic.
The stack
Here's what I landed on after a lot of trial, error, and migration headaches.
Hetzner handles the core compute. Load balancers, VMs, and S3-compatible object storage. The pricing is almost absurdly good compared to AWS, and the performance is solid. If you've never spun up a Hetzner box, you're overpaying for cloud compute.
Scaleway fills the gaps Hetzner doesn't cover. I use their Transactional Email (TEM) service, Container Registry, a second S3 bucket for specific workloads, their observability stack, and even their domain registrar. One provider, multiple services, it simplifies billing if nothing else.
Bunny.net is the unsung hero of this stack. CDN with distributed storage, DNS, image optimization, WAF, and DDoS protection, all from a company headquartered in Slovenia. Their edge network is genuinely impressive and their dashboard is a joy to use. Coming from Cloudflare, I felt at home rather quickly.
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