Moving to Europe

For reasons, I am slowly but surely moving most of my online resources to European providers. This has meant a journey of discovery, finding suitable ones for:

• Domain registration
• DNS hosting
• Some place for a few static (placeholder) websites
• Virtual servers of some kind
• Object storage or something similar
• Git repository hosting

Most of my information has come from european-alternatives.eu. Some test accounts were needed here and there because it isn't necessarily obvious how well they may cooperate with automation tools like Terraform and how much click-ops will be required, and how well does their web UI work in that case.

There were some hiccups with getting the European companies to play nice with my US credit cards.

One disappointment was because the company (Infomaniak 🇨🇭) seems to be incapable of sending SMS to US phone numbers. Pity, because they looked promising otherwise.

Another Nope was finding out that OVH 🇫🇷 pushes you to OVH US if you're in the US or Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of OVH Group, defeating the purpose of going with European companies.

Of these, statichost.eu was a nice find, because it will let you point to a git repository (public or private), and run with it, with support for either fully static content, or one of several static site generators, and even pick a specific version to avoid surprises.

That leaves virtual servers, for my self-hosted mail-server and the one-person-Mastodon instance. Most likely I'll pick one of UpCloud (🇫🇮) or Scaleway (🇫🇷), after sitting down again to do a side-by-side comparison.

For object storage Scaleway seems to have a reasonably priced solution, but that also needs another look.