10 ms·

Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

253 points by adulion 2mo ago

lucasdias0 2mo ago
Its absolutely baffling to me how reluctant EU businesses seems to be in actually wanting data sovereignty. So short sighted.
tokoi 2mo ago
[flagged]
rukshn 2mo ago
I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts. On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US. It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool. Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.
- gaurana 2mo ago
  > It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool. I think that’s because people who aren’t part of the open source FOSS camp don’t care where the services they use are based. And the people who don’t care tend to choose whatever is the easiest and most popular option. Hold on, did I just restate your whole point? Maybe I did.
- cube2222 2mo ago
  I think the reason for this is that if you're targeting folks for whom Europe-sovereignty resonates as an important factor, those will also care about sovereignty and self-sufficiency in general, and thus just skip your SaaS and go right for (semi) self-hosting. While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters. You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.
- shellwizard 2mo ago
  There are not many big vendors that are EU first apart from SAP, SuSE and a handful more. Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.
  - palata 2mo ago
    > Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide. That's a bit of a feature, I don't think the EU should want TooBigTech monopolies. Doesn't mean that there cannot be successful services in Europe.
- Pragmata 2mo ago
  Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    If the location of something is a part of what you use to decide what to use, then if it's in the EU which is your preferred location, it no longer is "an inferior option", it might end up your only option. But clearly you don't care, so understandably that choice doesn't make sense for you, that's all fine and good. But still you have to understand other people/organizations than you might have different requirements? Or is that a very foreign concept?
  - palata 2mo ago
    > If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me. Is it? If you live in the EU, the fact that pretty much all companies completely depend on US tech to work means that the US can not only spy on them (if Airbus uses Microsoft Teams, then the US government can ask Microsoft to give them access to the data and use that to help Boeing win contracts for instance), but also put pressure on those companies by blocking their access to that tech (it has happened). The "sovereignty" part here is a net positive for anyone living in the EU. Net negative for anyone living in the US of course, because being in a dominant position does favour the US.
    - villish 2mo ago
      The default stance should be that nothing you do is private on the internet. If we're talking spying then no service in any country will be secure unless fully encrypted with audits. Any country with an intelligence agency can force companies in their jurisdiction to give them access to data otherwise.
      - palata 2mo ago
        Not sure what you are trying to say, except that it confirms my point: if a company in say, Germany, uses Microsoft and Google services for all their communications, then the US (!) can just get access to all their data. Now if that company was using services based in Germany, then only Germany could access that data, which is obviously much less of a sovereignty problem (Germany interfering with Germany's affair is just a normal government).
- palata 2mo ago
  > I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue. Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo ago
  Its. You know. Look around. What our elites and noble families concot. Wirecard. etc.
- graemep 2mo ago
  You switch from talking about Europe to talking about the EU half way through. The article was about Europe (excluding Russia and a few others). > there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both. There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare. > On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US. A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.
- williamdclt 2mo ago
  Well it's because few people have "European-ness" as a strong personal value. Some people have strong values around open-source, or even around the specific country, but the sense of being European and valuing European things is just not very widespread, so in absence of a specific personal value, they pick the cheapest/biggest/most-known option which is usually American. This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.
- carlosjobim 2mo ago
  Computer software is so incredibly cheap in a business setting (that includes public sector) compared to all other tools and expenses, that it always makes sense to pay for and use the most feature complete software you can get.
boyander 2mo ago
[flagged]
herbst 2mo ago
So only in 2 smaller countries the "majority" is US served? That's what I read in that graphic
rmoriz 2mo ago
Mail (SMTP) is even worse.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  Here in Spain it seems better. We don't have tons of alternatives for web services, so lots end up on the typical clouds, but email hosting it seems every region has at least one ajuntament that runs their very own email servers. Helps that the country politically and socially is a bit decentralized since the beginning of the republic, but I was (pleasantly) surprised how many local governments here actually manage their own emails.
  - betaby 2mo ago
    Interesting fact. Is there a list of local government mx servers?
    - embedding-shape 2mo ago
      There was a HN submission with a map of email servers for local governments around in Europe (the world?), might have been a Show HN but I'm unable to find it now. It was an interactive map with a ton of local governments around in Europe, might have been bigger in scope too but mostly remember the European map as I was mostly focusing on Spain. Maybe someone else have better luck and could link it here? Might have been a month or two ago maybe.
- sam_lowry_ 2mo ago
  See https://mxmap.be/ https://mxmap.be/ and follow the links for other countries. Self-hosting mail infra is a forgotten skill, indeed
vb-8448 2mo ago
Wait to see what they are using for emails and for most of their internal docs (containing any kind of secrets)! I know companies that will tell you "I'm not gonna put any of my data in cloud, especially not American ones" but they are perfectly fine using any major cloud based office suite (mail, docs, chat/video apps, ecc ecc) where they voluntarily and deliberately load any kind of data.
Aissen 2mo ago
Good article because it clearly exposes the methodology and the shortcomings of the measurements (mostly the front CDN of a ~20k number of old continent entities of apex/www domain).
deleted 2mo ago
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deleted 2mo ago
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embedding-shape 2mo ago
> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate. This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites. I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it. > For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem. Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...
- rrr_oh_man 2mo ago
  > Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN... Yes, it's INFURIATING. I hate, hate, hate this. :( Can we start flagging shit like this, please?
  - cindyllm 2mo ago
    [dead]
- neya 2mo ago
  > Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN... Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    Yes, because it sounds reasonable at the beginning, then the further you go, the less sense it makes. Ultimately you look up the stuff that felt weird initially, and found the reason why it sounded so weird. If I never actually noticed it, it wouldn't be slop, that I'd agree with. But in this case, I did notice, so it is slop.
imp0cat 2mo ago
There was a post here on hn that showcased EU tech map which you can use to check for alternatives, ie for Gmail https://europeantechmap.eu/alternative-to/gmail?pricing=free&deployment=eu_saas&residency=eu_only https://europeantechmap.eu/alternative-to/gmail?pricing=free... There aren't many completely european solutions, but there are more than zero.
rrr_oh_man 2mo ago
AI slop be AI sloppin'.
collinmcnulty 2mo ago
As ever, there's a relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/
karambahh 2mo ago
This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far. It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes. Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"? Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect. Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)
Alien1Being 2mo ago
AI slop Right on the front page...
LucaSiviero 2mo ago
As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs? I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself. I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff. Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe? I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar? I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.
  - Scroll_Swe 2mo ago
    It's not that they cannot be found. But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?
    - embedding-shape 2mo ago
21asdffdsa12 2mo ago
Europe has reduced itself to a backwater. Surrounded by hostiles
- 3997531578 2mo ago
  [dead]
Scroll_Swe 2mo ago
Let me repost another comment of mine. TLDR: Yes, ofc we use Microsoft, Amazon (AWS), Cloudflare and Cisco... There is even mainstream press articles about it here in Sweden. "dependance on microsoft ooh so bad" etc. I find it laughable. Unless you have a time machine to 2005 (EC2 came out in 2006 that should have been the signal) there is no way to compete now. That train has left the platform. Second, Nokia and Ericsson dominate mobile infra in the west, but that is good I guess as they are EU? What does USA think about that? Third, let us say you get rid of MS. Now you have no MS but all network infra for broadband is Cisco, Huawei, Juniper etc. Good luck ripping that out. And for what? Same with AI. Mistral was amazing at first, Le Chat. Almost as good, generous free limits, good docs. Now? Just plain bad. Deepseek is better (I dislike china so I avoid it). EU should have gone in 500% the moment Mistral showed promise. But lately we let USA and China take the lead on everything and EU can write a strongly worded letter after about how bad it is. People will "care" when EU starts making good stuff again. And lastly lol, people do know everything ends in Taiwan in the end right?
- jurgenburgen 2mo ago
  So just lie down and take it? Let the yellow man put some more tariffs on imports from the EU. Let him ban EU citizens from Visa/Apple/Microsoft when they disagree with MAGA. Maybe give east Europe to Russia, the west half can be the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states. As long as there are no options we have no freedom.
  - Scroll_Swe 2mo ago
    No, we have a tech scene, Spotify, games, Telia Carrier. At least Sweden is world leading in tech and telecom and defence. (Ericsson, SAAB) But then okay, say you want to do more. Then do more. Not some letter from EU. There is a focus here on office and javascript... why? Okay if you want an EU M365, good luck. We were and are the best.
AznHisoka 2mo ago
I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companied are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which-cloud-is-actually-winning/#section5 https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which...
- deeddy 2mo ago
  The main reason is that they are based locally, they charge in EUR, you can get the VAT back, and they are much more affordable than AWS.
  - earthnail 2mo ago
    AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year. Hetzner is just way cheaper and pricing is more predictable. I don’t need any advanced cloud offerings. And yes, being outside the US is another advantage rn.
    - Hetzner_OL 2mo ago
      Hi there, I hope it's okay that I comment here since you mentioned us at Hetzner. Please see Hetzner Docs; https://docs.hetzner.com/general/billing-and-account-management/billing-at-hetzner/value-added-tax https://docs.hetzner.com/general/billing-and-account-managem... To enter the VAT ID on your account, go to https://accounts.hetzner.com/account/masterdata https://accounts.hetzner.com/account/masterdata and then to "Profile" and to "Contact details". --Katie
    - mike97 2mo ago
      > AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year. Hetzner can do the same as long as you have a valid VAT code.
      - 2mo ago
mrbluecoat 2mo ago
Curious what the percentage would be when you include Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Shopify...
JimBlackwood 2mo ago
This is just incorrect with a way too small set of websites. Their estimates are more than double. However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality. Source: I have access to better data.
deleted 2mo ago
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rusk 2mo ago
“American website hosting companies are disproportionately exposed to market shock from their European customers”
- Ampersander 2mo ago
  Where would those European customers go? China? Africa?
  - rusk 2mo ago
    I was suggesting that website hosting isn’t a particularly hard problem with no moat. European customers could go literally anywhere.
shevy-java 2mo ago
Europe right now is the ultimate US vasall. Germany is the leader here; France and Netherlands are much more self-conscious but also way too dependent on US corporations. The worst part is that in Germany with Merz in charge, this will not change. He is a good puppy for the USA.
santiagohzszmex 2mo ago
Interesante
jillesvangurp 2mo ago
A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives. And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equipment makers was merged and acquired in the early 2000s. For example Bell Labs is currently owned by Nokia. It includes bits and bobs that once belonged to companies like Lucent and Motorola. Another dependency is shipping; the US has very few ship yards left and is looking increasingly to the EU for things like icebreakers and some navy ships. Likewise, ASML the industry leader when it comes to making lithography machines used in chip making is based in the EU as well. And of course a lot of manufacturing uses machines made in e.g. Germany. IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.
- throwaway894345 2mo ago
  > IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either. I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile toward Europe (and toward the US for that matter). I'm speaking as an American.
  - koe123 2mo ago
    As it pertains to military, just wait a few years I think.
    - InTheArena 2mo ago
      The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world. International commerce and business and shared democratic norms are a fscking good things. We have lost the people who learned that the hard way, and they are being replaced with people who have never read a history book.
santiagohzszmex 2mo ago
Woow
khurs 2mo ago
There needs to be more free DDOS offerings and inbuilt DDOS from vm providers. There was a period of time where DDOS was always on the news and Cloudflare regularly published 'we stopped a quadrillion request per second attack', and so people who are unlikely to be targets were nether the less terrified of being targeted/running up large bandwidth bills and stuck sites behind Cloudflare as default. Should also add not just served by US vendors, but also 'and on American brand servers' seeing as most are Dell & HP with some Super Micro.
general1465 2mo ago
Why does that matter? If US vendors decides to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours. Same for git. Sure you can kill GitHub, but the git repository can be moved somewhere else within minutes. However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.
- drdexebtjl 2mo ago
  If the company I work at was forced to leave AWS and put all of our engineering teams to work on this, maybe we would finish it in 6 months, being very optimistic. If it were forced to do this immediately, it would shut down. Not everything is a simple web server that fits in a VPS. Some systems have thousands of moving parts, and some of those parts are proprietary services that only have one provider.
ludicrousdispla 2mo ago
whatsapp has entered the chat
orbifold 2mo ago
"What it means and what it does not": article is clearly written by claude, which for me at this point means that I pay as much attention to it as I do to Claudes output: I skim it and then move on. It actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content. Before it would have always been the other way around. Whoever wrote the article would have had to spend way more time writing it than me reading it.
addedlovely 2mo ago
[flagged]
kriro 2mo ago
My anecdotal evidence from France and Germany is that there is very much a trend to look for non-U.S. alternatives which is somewhat recent. It is related to the current government, not really politically motivated but more of a "no guarantees/cannot rely on this partner anymore" thinking coupled with a bit of "WTF annex Denmark, really". Many companies have task forces or projects to investigate moving tech stacks and in the past this was not even an agenda topic (despite strategic advantages and potential cost savings).
stasomatic 2mo ago
Looking at serving is very skin deep. The cloud is easy. What about the stack? MySQL hailed from Sweden, now owned by Oracle. The Linux Foundations is in the states. Nginx - F5 (US). There are many Europeans working on site or remotely for US tech. Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I am an American, and I don't like what I am seeing the last few years, but further balkanization doesn't seem to be a sound strategy.
- pyrale 2mo ago
  > Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I don’t see the US as willing to do the necessary stuff for that to happen honestly. Last threats on Greenland were this week, as were last threats on Spain.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
dlenski 2mo ago
Interesting read. Canada would be even more US-skewed. Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).
- TMWNN 2mo ago
  As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>.
LF3551 2mo ago
[dead]
RicoElectrico 2mo ago
It's a distraction. Websites are relatively easy to migrate, Office and AD not so much. Isn't it really a case of measuring what you can see vs what really matters?
lanthissa 2mo ago
EU companies own like 20% of EU compute, and a huge portion of that was from a russian asset being spun out.
BiteCode_dev 2mo ago
And it's a damn shame because we have awesome hosting in the EU. OVH is great value, Scaleway can handle lots of traffic, hetzner is so cheap... So it's "nobody gets fired to buy IBM" all over again.
jurschreuder 2mo ago
France and Germany are also kinda big, at least for the size of the country.
ryss20 2mo ago
[flagged]
hashstring 2mo ago
Cool, but, the thing is… even though CF is genuinely very good at what they do, I do not think that they have real moat. Nor does any other CDN provider have it. The top 5 CDNs in terms of popularity are all US-based companies. However, Bunny and other providers are growing and becoming real market competitors. Switching from Microsoft, Amazon, or heavy Google-based infra to on-prem or other vendors is much more complicated than switching the CDN. CDNs are a very replaceable component. Basically a DNS record update away, and a bit of config.

253 points by adulion 2mo ago

Its absolutely baffling to me how reluctant EU businesses seems to be in actually wanting data sovereignty. So short sighted.

tokoi 2mo ago

[flagged]

rukshn 2mo ago

I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired, there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated, and would not want to use a close source tools even though they are developed by European counterparts. On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US. It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool. Also processes take forever, and everything has to go through lot of meetings, and bureaucracy and red-tape and no one is willing to take a chance on a small startup.

gaurana 2mo ago
> It's hard to find people who are in the middle who would like to pay and use a EU made tool. I think that’s because people who aren’t part of the open source FOSS camp don’t care where the services they use are based. And the people who don’t care tend to choose whatever is the easiest and most popular option. Hold on, did I just restate your whole point? Maybe I did.
cube2222 2mo ago
I think the reason for this is that if you're targeting folks for whom Europe-sovereignty resonates as an important factor, those will also care about sovereignty and self-sufficiency in general, and thus just skip your SaaS and go right for (semi) self-hosting. While for the other side where the sovereignty is not an important factor, it's product quality that matters. You can absolutely make a European startup that sells B2B SaaS, successfully, it just has to be better than the competition, and being European will not be enough.
shellwizard 2mo ago
There are not many big vendors that are EU first apart from SAP, SuSE and a handful more. Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide.
- palata 2mo ago
  > Nothing similar to what MS, IBM, Google, Intel, AMD , Nvidia or Meta provide. That's a bit of a feature, I don't think the EU should want TooBigTech monopolies. Doesn't mean that there cannot be successful services in Europe.
Pragmata 2mo ago
Why would i want an inferior option just because it's made in the EU? I'm not an EU nationalist, i don't care if "EU Tech Companies" are a thing. If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  If the location of something is a part of what you use to decide what to use, then if it's in the EU which is your preferred location, it no longer is "an inferior option", it might end up your only option. But clearly you don't care, so understandably that choice doesn't make sense for you, that's all fine and good. But still you have to understand other people/organizations than you might have different requirements? Or is that a very foreign concept?
- palata 2mo ago
  > If anything "EU Tech Sovereignty" is a net negative for me. Is it? If you live in the EU, the fact that pretty much all companies completely depend on US tech to work means that the US can not only spy on them (if Airbus uses Microsoft Teams, then the US government can ask Microsoft to give them access to the data and use that to help Boeing win contracts for instance), but also put pressure on those companies by blocking their access to that tech (it has happened). The "sovereignty" part here is a net positive for anyone living in the EU. Net negative for anyone living in the US of course, because being in a dominant position does favour the US.
  - villish 2mo ago
    The default stance should be that nothing you do is private on the internet. If we're talking spying then no service in any country will be secure unless fully encrypted with audits. Any country with an intelligence agency can force companies in their jurisdiction to give them access to data otherwise.
    - palata 2mo ago
      Not sure what you are trying to say, except that it confirms my point: if a company in say, Germany, uses Microsoft and Google services for all their communications, then the US (!) can just get access to all their data. Now if that company was using services based in Germany, then only Germany could access that data, which is obviously much less of a sovereignty problem (Germany interfering with Germany's affair is just a normal government).
palata 2mo ago
> I find the Europe's relationship with tech to be wired I don't think it's weird: almost nobody cares, they just use whatever they know/is free. It turns out it is US tech. It's the exact same situation in the US, except that for them it is not a sovereignty issue. Now maybe there is a bigger open source community in Europe, but I don't see a problem with that.
21asdffdsa12 2mo ago
Its. You know. Look around. What our elites and noble families concot. Wirecard. etc.
graemep 2mo ago
You switch from talking about Europe to talking about the EU half way through. The article was about Europe (excluding Russia and a few others). > there is one section that is hardcore-opensource fanatics, they want to host everything by themselves, and want to go through the trouble of keeping things updated Using Cloudflare, AWS etc. does not mean you do not have to keep things updated. Using an SaaS does. The numbers in the article count both. There are plenty of people who use FOSS only and non-US hosting, and still use Cloudflare. > On the other side there are people who are techy but happy to use US products, and when you pitch something European they would cite some tool that's better and bigger in US. A preference for what they already know (maybe reinforced by marketing). Its not that they prefer American products, but American dominance means it is what everyone already knows.
williamdclt 2mo ago
Well it's because few people have "European-ness" as a strong personal value. Some people have strong values around open-source, or even around the specific country, but the sense of being European and valuing European things is just not very widespread, so in absence of a specific personal value, they pick the cheapest/biggest/most-known option which is usually American. This is quickly changing though: my subjective take is that the US antagonism is pushing people away from American product AND making the European identity stronger.
carlosjobim 2mo ago
Computer software is so incredibly cheap in a business setting (that includes public sector) compared to all other tools and expenses, that it always makes sense to pay for and use the most feature complete software you can get.

boyander 2mo ago

[flagged]

herbst 2mo ago

So only in 2 smaller countries the "majority" is US served? That's what I read in that graphic

rmoriz 2mo ago

Mail (SMTP) is even worse.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
Here in Spain it seems better. We don't have tons of alternatives for web services, so lots end up on the typical clouds, but email hosting it seems every region has at least one ajuntament that runs their very own email servers. Helps that the country politically and socially is a bit decentralized since the beginning of the republic, but I was (pleasantly) surprised how many local governments here actually manage their own emails.
- betaby 2mo ago
  Interesting fact. Is there a list of local government mx servers?
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    There was a HN submission with a map of email servers for local governments around in Europe (the world?), might have been a Show HN but I'm unable to find it now. It was an interactive map with a ton of local governments around in Europe, might have been bigger in scope too but mostly remember the European map as I was mostly focusing on Spain. Maybe someone else have better luck and could link it here? Might have been a month or two ago maybe.
sam_lowry_ 2mo ago
See https://mxmap.be/ https://mxmap.be/ and follow the links for other countries. Self-hosting mail infra is a forgotten skill, indeed

vb-8448 2mo ago

Wait to see what they are using for emails and for most of their internal docs (containing any kind of secrets)! I know companies that will tell you "I'm not gonna put any of my data in cloud, especially not American ones" but they are perfectly fine using any major cloud based office suite (mail, docs, chat/video apps, ecc ecc) where they voluntarily and deliberately load any kind of data.

Aissen 2mo ago

Good article because it clearly exposes the methodology and the shortcomings of the measurements (mostly the front CDN of a ~20k number of old continent entities of apex/www domain).

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embedding-shape 2mo ago

> The practical point is not that every European company should leave US infrastructure tomorrow. The point is that sovereignty discussions often start too late in the stack. Before organisations debate cloud regions, subprocessors, or contractual controls, they should know which vendors already sit in front of their public web estate. This seems like the wrong takeaway and I'd advice (European) companies to do the opposite: Don't look at what your marketing/landing page does first, care first about where your actual user/company data lives, what processors are touching it and so on. Then once you have your internal house in order, then do the easy surface-level stuff like what vendor sits in front of your marketing websites. I don't understand why they'd advise people to do things in that suggested order, seems really backwards and like they're more interested in patching over the problem rather than actually solving it. > For European infrastructure vendors, this is the market map. For policymakers, it is the base rate. For buyers, it is the inventory problem. Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN...

rrr_oh_man 2mo ago
> Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN... Yes, it's INFURIATING. I hate, hate, hate this. :( Can we start flagging shit like this, please?
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]
neya 2mo ago
> Dammit, fell for another AI slop article AGAIN... Is it really "slop" if you keep falling for AI written articles again and again? Doesn't that actually mean the opposite - the AI seemingly convinced you (or almost) that it was written by a realy human?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  Yes, because it sounds reasonable at the beginning, then the further you go, the less sense it makes. Ultimately you look up the stuff that felt weird initially, and found the reason why it sounded so weird. If I never actually noticed it, it wouldn't be slop, that I'd agree with. But in this case, I did notice, so it is slop.

imp0cat 2mo ago

There was a post here on hn that showcased EU tech map which you can use to check for alternatives, ie for Gmail https://europeantechmap.eu/alternative-to/gmail?pricing=free&deployment=eu_saas&residency=eu_only https://europeantechmap.eu/alternative-to/gmail?pricing=free... There aren't many completely european solutions, but there are more than zero.

rrr_oh_man 2mo ago

AI slop be AI sloppin'.

collinmcnulty 2mo ago

As ever, there's a relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/

karambahh 2mo ago

This tries to capture Europe as a single coherent market, which it is not and by far. It's comparing countries with vastly different socio-economical landscapes and sizes. Is "using Cloudflare as a CDN but hosting everything at, say, Hetzner using generic systems/opensource components" the same as "having built a complete ecosystem with Amazon specific software"? Getting out of the walled garden of AWS, GCP or Azure is notoriously difficult. Some european cloud providers made this one of their key selling point, advocating for openess and "multicloud". This had, to my knowledge, next to no effect. Vendor lockin is real. Dependency to a vendor located outside of your generic law system is, indeed, a risk. But this article probably isn't the way to measure it (and it's a tough job to do)

Alien1Being 2mo ago

AI slop Right on the front page...

LucaSiviero 2mo ago

As an Italian solo-founder, I have to admit that the US vendor dependency is really strong, but when you look at what you need to build a serious product, what can you actually use from European vendors that is even close to US products? Take Stripe as an example: is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Not to talk about Cloud and Edge Computing vendors: GCP, AWS, Cloudflare... does anyone even get close to these products / companies and what they offer? Managed environments, automatic scaling, serverless architectures that just work and cover all your needs? I'm a big fan of Hetzner, which has great prices, a great managed environment and lot of features that give you a reliable structure to work on, but I don't actually want to manage everything by myself. I also use Bunny.net for my products, but the services are still limited and contained to very specific stuff. Just take a look at Neon Postgres as an example: where do you find a product like this in Europe? I believe that the problem is mainly structural and cultural. When a new technology comes out, it's usually from US researchers and companies. So how does Europe even stand a (real) chance at giving the world (or the continent) the best packaged services?

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> is there a real alternative that covers what they do? Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar? I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.
- Scroll_Swe 2mo ago
  It's not that they cannot be found. But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago

21asdffdsa12 2mo ago

Europe has reduced itself to a backwater. Surrounded by hostiles

3997531578 2mo ago
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Scroll_Swe 2mo ago

Let me repost another comment of mine. TLDR: Yes, ofc we use Microsoft, Amazon (AWS), Cloudflare and Cisco... There is even mainstream press articles about it here in Sweden. "dependance on microsoft ooh so bad" etc. I find it laughable. Unless you have a time machine to 2005 (EC2 came out in 2006 that should have been the signal) there is no way to compete now. That train has left the platform. Second, Nokia and Ericsson dominate mobile infra in the west, but that is good I guess as they are EU? What does USA think about that? Third, let us say you get rid of MS. Now you have no MS but all network infra for broadband is Cisco, Huawei, Juniper etc. Good luck ripping that out. And for what? Same with AI. Mistral was amazing at first, Le Chat. Almost as good, generous free limits, good docs. Now? Just plain bad. Deepseek is better (I dislike china so I avoid it). EU should have gone in 500% the moment Mistral showed promise. But lately we let USA and China take the lead on everything and EU can write a strongly worded letter after about how bad it is. People will "care" when EU starts making good stuff again. And lastly lol, people do know everything ends in Taiwan in the end right?

jurgenburgen 2mo ago
So just lie down and take it? Let the yellow man put some more tariffs on imports from the EU. Let him ban EU citizens from Visa/Apple/Microsoft when they disagree with MAGA. Maybe give east Europe to Russia, the west half can be the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states. As long as there are no options we have no freedom.
- Scroll_Swe 2mo ago
  No, we have a tech scene, Spotify, games, Telia Carrier. At least Sweden is world leading in tech and telecom and defence. (Ericsson, SAAB) But then okay, say you want to do more. Then do more. Not some letter from EU. There is a focus here on office and javascript... why? Okay if you want an EU M365, good luck. We were and are the best.

AznHisoka 2mo ago

I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companied are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which-cloud-is-actually-winning/#section5 https://bloomberry.com/blog/we-analyzed-50k-apis-heres-which...

deeddy 2mo ago
The main reason is that they are based locally, they charge in EUR, you can get the VAT back, and they are much more affordable than AWS.
- earthnail 2mo ago
  AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year. Hetzner is just way cheaper and pricing is more predictable. I don’t need any advanced cloud offerings. And yes, being outside the US is another advantage rn.
  - Hetzner_OL 2mo ago
    Hi there, I hope it's okay that I comment here since you mentioned us at Hetzner. Please see Hetzner Docs; https://docs.hetzner.com/general/billing-and-account-management/billing-at-hetzner/value-added-tax https://docs.hetzner.com/general/billing-and-account-managem... To enter the VAT ID on your account, go to https://accounts.hetzner.com/account/masterdata https://accounts.hetzner.com/account/masterdata and then to "Profile" and to "Contact details". --Katie
  - mike97 2mo ago
    > AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year. Hetzner can do the same as long as you have a valid VAT code.
    - 2mo ago

mrbluecoat 2mo ago

Curious what the percentage would be when you include Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Shopify...

JimBlackwood 2mo ago

This is just incorrect with a way too small set of websites. Their estimates are more than double. However, that is if you take all websites into account. If you only take the most popular websites/biggest companies, their estimates are closer to reality. Source: I have access to better data.

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rusk 2mo ago

“American website hosting companies are disproportionately exposed to market shock from their European customers”

Ampersander 2mo ago
Where would those European customers go? China? Africa?
- rusk 2mo ago
  I was suggesting that website hosting isn’t a particularly hard problem with no moat. European customers could go literally anywhere.

shevy-java 2mo ago

Europe right now is the ultimate US vasall. Germany is the leader here; France and Netherlands are much more self-conscious but also way too dependent on US corporations. The worst part is that in Germany with Merz in charge, this will not change. He is a good puppy for the USA.

santiagohzszmex 2mo ago

Interesante

jillesvangurp 2mo ago

A lot of these US vendors have data centers in the EU operating under EU law via legal entities in the EU. So, it's not all that black and white. And there are a growing amount of EU based alternatives. And just to make a counter point, there are also US dependencies on the EU for some things as well. Mobile infrastructure is a good example; mostly comes from Nokia and Ericsson. What was left of US based network equipment makers was merged and acquired in the early 2000s. For example Bell Labs is currently owned by Nokia. It includes bits and bobs that once belonged to companies like Lucent and Motorola. Another dependency is shipping; the US has very few ship yards left and is looking increasingly to the EU for things like icebreakers and some navy ships. Likewise, ASML the industry leader when it comes to making lithography machines used in chip making is based in the EU as well. And of course a lot of manufacturing uses machines made in e.g. Germany. IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either.

throwaway894345 2mo ago
> IMHO this mutual interdependence is actually a good thing. It stimulates maintaining peaceful relations and engaging in trade. We could use a little more of that. Isolationism didn't lead to anything good last century either. I think interdependence is a good thing, but I think the EU is _reliant_ on the US militarily and economically and that's ... not great particularly when the US leadership is openly hostile toward Europe (and toward the US for that matter). I'm speaking as an American.
- koe123 2mo ago
  As it pertains to military, just wait a few years I think.
  - InTheArena 2mo ago
    The last three times that Europe had a large independent military force(s), things didn't end so well for the world. International commerce and business and shared democratic norms are a fscking good things. We have lost the people who learned that the hard way, and they are being replaced with people who have never read a history book.

santiagohzszmex 2mo ago

Woow

khurs 2mo ago

There needs to be more free DDOS offerings and inbuilt DDOS from vm providers. There was a period of time where DDOS was always on the news and Cloudflare regularly published 'we stopped a quadrillion request per second attack', and so people who are unlikely to be targets were nether the less terrified of being targeted/running up large bandwidth bills and stuck sites behind Cloudflare as default. Should also add not just served by US vendors, but also 'and on American brand servers' seeing as most are Dell & HP with some Super Micro.

general1465 2mo ago

Why does that matter? If US vendors decides to kill the service for EU customer, they can move a webserver on a different VPS within hours. Same for git. Sure you can kill GitHub, but the git repository can be moved somewhere else within minutes. However in both cases US vendors will suffer catastrophic trust loss for rest of the world. It would be a lose-lose situation.

drdexebtjl 2mo ago
If the company I work at was forced to leave AWS and put all of our engineering teams to work on this, maybe we would finish it in 6 months, being very optimistic. If it were forced to do this immediately, it would shut down. Not everything is a simple web server that fits in a VPS. Some systems have thousands of moving parts, and some of those parts are proprietary services that only have one provider.

ludicrousdispla 2mo ago

whatsapp has entered the chat

orbifold 2mo ago

"What it means and what it does not": article is clearly written by claude, which for me at this point means that I pay as much attention to it as I do to Claudes output: I skim it and then move on. It actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content. Before it would have always been the other way around. Whoever wrote the article would have had to spend way more time writing it than me reading it.

addedlovely 2mo ago

[flagged]

kriro 2mo ago

My anecdotal evidence from France and Germany is that there is very much a trend to look for non-U.S. alternatives which is somewhat recent. It is related to the current government, not really politically motivated but more of a "no guarantees/cannot rely on this partner anymore" thinking coupled with a bit of "WTF annex Denmark, really". Many companies have task forces or projects to investigate moving tech stacks and in the past this was not even an agenda topic (despite strategic advantages and potential cost savings).

stasomatic 2mo ago

Looking at serving is very skin deep. The cloud is easy. What about the stack? MySQL hailed from Sweden, now owned by Oracle. The Linux Foundations is in the states. Nginx - F5 (US). There are many Europeans working on site or remotely for US tech. Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I am an American, and I don't like what I am seeing the last few years, but further balkanization doesn't seem to be a sound strategy.

pyrale 2mo ago
> Can/should Europe reinvent all this from scratch or can we just apologize, kiss and hug and move on? I don’t see the US as willing to do the necessary stuff for that to happen honestly. Last threats on Greenland were this week, as were last threats on Spain.
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dlenski 2mo ago

Interesting read. Canada would be even more US-skewed. Canada is lacking in large domestic cloud providers and Canadian companies often use the default US regions of public clouds (e.g. AWS us-east-1) rather than Canada regions (e.g. ca-central-1).

TMWNN 2mo ago
As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>.

LF3551 2mo ago

[dead]

RicoElectrico 2mo ago

It's a distraction. Websites are relatively easy to migrate, Office and AD not so much. Isn't it really a case of measuring what you can see vs what really matters?

lanthissa 2mo ago

EU companies own like 20% of EU compute, and a huge portion of that was from a russian asset being spun out.

BiteCode_dev 2mo ago

And it's a damn shame because we have awesome hosting in the EU. OVH is great value, Scaleway can handle lots of traffic, hetzner is so cheap... So it's "nobody gets fired to buy IBM" all over again.

jurschreuder 2mo ago

France and Germany are also kinda big, at least for the size of the country.

ryss20 2mo ago

[flagged]

hashstring 2mo ago

Cool, but, the thing is… even though CF is genuinely very good at what they do, I do not think that they have real moat. Nor does any other CDN provider have it. The top 5 CDNs in terms of popularity are all US-based companies. However, Bunny and other providers are growing and becoming real market competitors. Switching from Microsoft, Amazon, or heavy Google-based infra to on-prem or other vendors is much more complicated than switching the CDN. CDNs are a very replaceable component. Basically a DNS record update away, and a bit of config.