There has been some talk lately about the over-reliance of the European Union on USA-based technologies, including IT&C, and especially with regard to cloud services. Much of this talk is about the EU official institutions, and very little about private businesses and individuals. Thus, not much attention was given to the non-governmental sector.
And I won't / can't debate if this over-reliance is true or not: the vast majority of our public institutions run on Windows and Office, and where they don't use Microsoft they use Google's alternatives; the vast majority of our IT infrastructure runs on USA-based corporations; the vast majority of the on-line population uses USA-based social networks; and so on in every corner of our digital lives... (And where a non-USA and non-EU competitor does emerge, the USA tries to force its hand to become a USA-based entity...)
However, just complaing about something won't actually solve anything, and it's not like there is an already existing EU-based Windows or Facebook alternative... (Sure, there is Linux, and there is Mastodon, but I'm wondering where does the majority of the development effort comes from? Did the EU suddenly decide to sponsor these projects as it saw these projects as a cornerstone to its digital independence, or did the EU build yet another particle accelerator?)
Thus, I've embarked on a little quest for a personal project of mine. A project that has yet to pass the idea phase.
I want to implement a simple SaaS that would focus on privacy and long-term sustainability. Privacy as in "I don't want to look at your stuff, but in case it's illegal or malware, and someone complains about it, I'll just remove it". Long-term sustainability as in "I want to do this for the community, not to buy myself a yacht shipyard, and thus if it ever gets popular, the infrastructure costs should be sustainable from small donations and contributions".
What does this project do? Doesn't matter: it could be a library of cookie recipes, or it could be a social network site that stores the user's latest status. It's a mildly simple software system, with basic infrastructure needs: a few domain names, a CDN, a few VMs, and that's about it.
So, given I'm an EU citizen, and I want to believe we can achieve something, if not 100% EU made, at least something 100% EU hosted, I started searching for EU-based providers.
By EU-based providers I mean the following:
- (mandatory) by EU I do mean the proper European Union, not the various extended economic areas and partnerships; (I have nothing against Norway, Switzerland, UK, and other partners; however the appeal of the EU, at least in terms of privacy laws, is its binding reglementation strength;)
- (mandatory) they should be fully incorporated in the EU, not just a branch of some external entity;
- (mandatory) they should host the core of their infrastructure in the EU; (sure they can outsource marketing site hosting, source-code hosting, or even labor, however the data should remain in the EU;)
- (optional) if possible, and if they require services from other companies, especially cloud or other infrastructure services, these third-party partners should themselves be EU-based (applying the same rules here);
And boy, was I in for a surprise...
Sure, there are quite a few European alternatives for many categories. However, and for the reasons I'll describe shortly, I don't think I'll be able to choose many of these...
But first, a little detour: I mentioned that my project is in the early idea phase; thus, obviously, I have no revenue, no donations, nothing except my own spare time and energy. Thus my budget starts at 0 EURO (for this year, and most likely forever after).
So, let's get started:
- I used an EU-based DNS registrar, and bought 5
.eudomains, at 8 EURO plus VAT each (thus ~48 EURO each year); - I used an EU-based VM provider, and settled for a VM that costs ~5 EURO plus VAT per month (thus ~64 EURO per year), for the performance equivalent of a RaspberryPi;
My remainder budget is so far -112 EURO for this year.
All the previous was achieved by using existing accounts I have with existing EU-based providers, thus using my personal email. However, for operational purposes, the next items I wanted to be held separately from my personal stuff, thus, I needed an online identity, namely an email address...
Because I only need this email to register accounts with other providers, not to send any bulk offers or spam, let alone any invoices I might issue, and because I'm already in the red for the foreseeable future, I wanted to find a EU-based email provider that would give me an email address for free... (Shockers, I know...)
Of which I've found exactly one, which allows me to sign-up only after I pinky-swear I only have a single free account with them... Okay... Sure, I swear it...
Oh, and BTW, I better dust off my calendar, because I must log-in every few months or so, else my free account is deleted, any anybody can re-register it, and impersonate me all over the place where I've used this freshly minted free email address... It's good I don't intend it to use it to register accounts with core infrastructure providers such as DNS, CDN, VMs, etc... Oh, wait, that's exactly what I intend to do...
Then I move to the DNS; I could use my registrar for the DNS, but I wanted to be flexible, and searched an EU-based provider (again, remember the negative budget for this year, just for an idea project) that allows me to host the 5 DNS zones for free.
Of which I've found exactly one, which allows me to configure only one DNS domain... Okay... Let's contact support to see if they would allow me the 5 domains I need... (Which they eventually did.)
While I'm still waiting for the DNS provider, let's see if I can find an EU-based CDN, because a CDN could be an essential piece of infrastructure for my project, if not from a performance point of view, certainly from a security point of view.
And sure, there are quite a few EU-based CDN providers, out of which... ZERO!... of them provides me with a free account.
Which I guess is to be expected, because nobody provides me with a free VM (even if it's just an idea project, and we're well past the Heroku peak days) and thus I could make my already red budget a bit more red.
So let's see how much would it cost me to use an EU-based CDN... (Long expletatives follows...) They want to charge me at least 5 times the price of the VM, at for the traffic at least 20 times than the same VM provider charges for the same amount of traffic...
Guess I'll just go with CloudFlare (for the email forwarding), CloudFlare (for the DNS hosting) and CloudFlare (for the CDN and DDoS protection)...
I do care about privacy, but I also do care about not burning money for just an idea project...
Which are these cloud providers? Doesn't matter! I am grateful to those that do offer free accounts, however once we get passed the free offerings, the prices are just bonkers (especially for the CDNs). I can't afford to pay 10x more on ancillary stuff like email, DNS, CDN, that I pay for the smallest VM just to have my proof-of-concept accessible from the internet.
I'll just start with the US-based alternatives, that would start charging me much later in my project's life-cycle, if they ever do charge me, and by that time I'll already be locked-in into their offerings, and too late to switch to the similarly priced EU alternatives.
The moral of the story?
All projects and companies start with an idea. However, the vast majority of them die before making a single EURO in revenue, and most of them don't reach a positive balance sheet well into their two-digit years...
Thus the vast majority of these projects or companies, at the early stage of their development life-cycle, have very basic needs and resource consumption:
- a few email addresses would be enough, or even one single inbox with a handful of aliases, with at most a few hundreds of MiBs of storage size; they don't need 20 GiB of free email storage, plus calendars, plus email templates, plus custom domains, plus other enterprise-ish features; they most likely need 4 MiB to receive other provider signup confirmations and password reset requests;
- a few domains that practically generate a handful of DNS resolutions per day; they could even start without a DNS domain, if there would be a free DNS sub-domain provider that would provide a forwarding or redirection scheme when the project or company moves to its own domain;
- a CDN that would at first just mask the IP of the VM to fight DDoS and mitigate other security threats; at best it could cache a few KiB of static HTML and CSS for the "work in progress" landing page;
- a tiny VM, that could very well be a RaspberryPi Zero equivalent (i.e. 2 cores 512 MiB of RAM), running 24x7 doing almost nothing in terms of CPU;
These are the core infrastructure parts that every project or company, even the starting ones, requires to have an internet presence.
However, in terms of availability (at free or affordable prices), EU-based alternatives are a complete no-go situation!
What can the EU-based providers do?
Help projects or companies start to use EU-based alternatives, by offering competitive offerings as their USA-based competitors do.
Even if they can't match the free offerings from the USA-based competitors, offer something that is enough to get started:
- for email, a free 256 MiB mailbox (or even less), with perhaps 3 aliases, could be enough; you can even throw in a 90 day retention policy, after which you start purging old emails;
- for DNS, don't limit the number of domains (there is no technical difference between a domain with 100 records, and 10 domains with 10 records each); perhaps limit the number of queries per day if you need to;
- for CDN, don't offer unlimited plans (both in terms of usage and sky-high price per GiB), limit the number of requests or traffic per day, and perhaps limit the cache size or number of cached resources;
And, if free accounts are going to completely ruin your business, or you are afraid of freeloader abuse, and you need to charge something, make it at most 10% of the price of the VM! Again, I'm not working on SAP selling software to the EU commission!
You can't expect me to pay the same amount per email address as I do pay for a single VM. You can't expect me to pay a CDN on traffic 20x times as much as a VM provider charges me for the same amount of traffic.
I would like to say that I'm optimistic about the EU-based cloud alternatives, but I'm not.
Given what I've seen, and given the glacial pace at which anything happens in the EU, I don't think the EU could become a real competitor on the global IT&C market, at least not for the small and medium businesses.
Unfortunately for the moment, and most likely for the medium to long term, most operational costs of EU-based startups and companies would be siphoned away into the USA economy, because VC-backed companies win in the long term by capturing their clients while they are still small and don't have large operating budgets, and retain them afterward by technological lock-in.
What can one do today, if one wishes to host his small project or company on purely EU-based infrastructure?
Besides self-hosting everything from DNS to email to CDN on an EU-based VM provider?
Nothing... Except watching simulations of how particles collide in the latest EU investment in EU's technological future!