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.

Nebius powers our AI inference. If you need GPU compute in Europe without sending requests to us-east-1, they're one of the few real options.

Hanko handles authentication and identity. A German provider that gives you passkeys, social logins, and user management without reaching for Auth0 or Clerk. More on this in the "can't avoid" section — it doesn't eliminate American dependencies entirely, but it keeps the auth layer European.
Self-hosting: Rancher, my beloved

This is where things get fun... and time-consuming. I self-host a surprising amount:

Gitea for source control
Plausible for privacy-friendly analytics
Twenty CRM for customer management
Infisical for secrets management
Bugsink for error tracking

All running on Kubernetes, with Rancher as the glue keeping the whole cluster sane.

Is self-hosting more work than SaaS? Obviously. But it means my data stays exactly where I put it, and I'm not at the mercy of a provider's pricing changes or acquisition drama.

For email, Tutanota keeps things encrypted and European. UptimeRobot watches the monitors so I can sleep.

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