GoKawiilHow I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe
On digital sovereignty, and why European cloud is better than you think
10 min. Digital SovereigntyDigital InfrastructureDigital AutonomyEuropean CloudEurope
100% accurate European digital infrastructure, AI generated
There’s a version of this post that starts with a spreadsheet and ends with a quiet sense of satisfaction. That’s mostly how it went. But underneath the practical exercise of swapping one SaaS tool for another was something that felt more urgent, a growing discomfort with how much of my digital infrastructure sat on servers I didn’t control, in a jurisdiction increasingly prone to unpredictability, operated by companies whose incentives don’t always align with mine.
Digital sovereignty sounds like a buzzword until you think carefully about what it means. It means knowing where your data lives. It means not being one policy change, one acquisition, or one executive’s bad mood away from losing access to tools your business depends on. It means choosing infrastructure based on values, not just convenience.
So I started migrating.
Analytics
Google Analytics was the obvious first target. It’s the canonical example of a service that’s free because you are the product, your visitors’ behavior funneled back into Google’s advertising machinery.
Self-hosting Matomo solved this cleanly. The data stays on my own server I had to instantiate a new small server for this, which is cheap, but not free. , and I’m fully GDPR-compliant without the cookie consent theater that Google Analytics typically requires. The reporting is comprehensive, the interface is familiar enough, and I own everything.
... continue reading