Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

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• Hacker News
• 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?

  by Scroll_Swe
• 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.

  by jurgenburgen
• “American website hosting companies are disproportionately exposed to market shock from their European customers”
  by rusk
• Where would those European customers go? China? Africa?
  by Ampersander
• whatsapp has entered the chat
  by ludicrousdispla
• AI slop

  Right on the front page...

  by Alien1Being
• AI slop be AI sloppin'.
  by rrr_oh_man
• 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...

  There aren't many completely european solutions, but there are more than zero.

  by imp0cat
• 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.
  by shevy-java
• Woow
  by santiagohzszmex
• 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?
  by RicoElectrico
• Interesante
  by santiagohzszmex
• 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.

  by BiteCode_dev
• Mail (SMTP) is even worse.
  by rmoriz
• 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.
  by embedding-shape
• See https://mxmap.be/ and follow the links for other countries.

  Self-hosting mail infra is a forgotten skill, indeed

  by sam_lowry_
• As ever, there's a relevant xkcd

  https://xkcd.com/932/

  by collinmcnulty
• 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.

  by general1465
• 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.

  by drdexebtjl
• Europe has reduced itself to a backwater. Surrounded by hostiles
  by 21asdffdsa12
• 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.

  by vb-8448
• 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.

  by stasomatic
• Curious what the percentage would be when you include Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Shopify...
  by mrbluecoat
• So only in 2 smaller countries the "majority" is US served? That's what I read in that graphic
  by herbst
• France and Germany are also kinda big, at least for the size of the country.
  by jurschreuder
• EU companies own like 20% of EU compute, and a huge portion of that was from a russian asset being spun out.
  by lanthissa
• 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).
  by Aissen
• 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.

  by khurs
• 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).
  by kriro
• 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.

  by rukshn