Beware if you want to use Hetzner's s3, they had a massive repeated outage over the past few days and don't offer any reliability guarantee, not even something like 99.9%. Maybe you're thinking of something else, or don't care if you can't upload/download for a few hours here and there - just wanted to warn as I was surprised by this as a user.

Around the time where Hetzner was all the rage ("Just host your own server for $8 a month!") I was trying to sign up. They had a multi-day outage that prevented even signing up. I think I was lucky to experience that before I started using them.

Its great service. I cannot say a bad thing after years of use.

Yes, I was considering Hetzner or Scaleway, I have a few months to decide before my current prepaid plan expires.

Thank you for the heads-up !

I've had 0 issues with Hetzner's servers, they're great at that. I hoped this would translate to cloud services as well, but it turns out (not surprisingly in hindsight) that offering a fully managed service is something completely different than cheap and easily administered server.

They launched recently their S3 Storage, so I think some initial issues are inevitable.

True, but then they shouldn't claim "High availability" as an empty promise without even a non-binding expected number, like 99.9%.

Also, it's not good that they do not have any status tracker that shows summary stats on uptime over the past, say, year so one can get a quick idea of how reliable the service was historically.

The status monitor only has entries for incidences from the past 7 days. It could have been down for 10 days a month ago, you wouldn't know this unless someone wrote about it.

_You_ know the service is new, but this isn't mentioned on the landing page either. They don't say something like "only 4 months old, public beta" - in that case I wouldn't feel negatively surprised.

I just had a look at their page. Their S3 is different from Amazon. In AWS, it is global - they synchronize the objects between locations which menas it's eventually consistent but it has amazing SLA. Whereas Hetzner clearly states: "Currently, Object Storage is available in the following locations: Falkenstein, DE (FSN1), Helsinki, FI (HEL1), and Nuremberg, DE (NBG1)." So if I wanted HA, I'd use two locations or more.

As someone who has been managing his own servers (and also hosting services for his clients) for many years, I can understand the issues, problems and difficulties that can arise, so I have learned to be much more patient and understanding.

I learned (the hard way) to have a plan b for everything. I'll study an emergency solution in case of a prolonged downtime.

That's a good point. I've been surprised and frustrated by the S3 issues we've encountered since the hundreds of servers we are hosting on Hetzner Cloud have rarely had any issues. Only now i realize that this is the first service they are offering apart from networking that includes LB.

Wait, so is it available now? They had it in free beta for some selected customers, I had no idea it's available already!

Yes I think it's been fully public out of beta for around 4 months IIRC

From a software developer viewpoint, my biggest worry is about GitHub, owned by Microsoft. I self host my open source code with Forgejo.

Can you explain what exactly your worry is with GitHub? If you have your repos locally, you can always go somewhere else if/when something happens with GitHub. Except if you rely on things like Github actions or other features that are harder to move.

Well, one day MS could shut everything down or charge a lot of money to continue using the services. Almost all open source projects are currently hosted on Github (and rely on their services).

Yes, the code is replicated on thousands of machines around the web, but this concentration of control by a single company is extremely dangerous in my opinion.

The way events are unfolding these days, I'm really worried about what could happen.

Take for example Starlink and Ukraine... The USA threatened to shut down the internet service if Ukraine won't sign the rare minerals deal. A deal that would make Ukraine a colony of USA.

The contexts aren't the same. You aren't a captive audience with GitHub, and the "concentration of control by a single company" makes it sound like they forced us to use their service. We chose to gather there because of critical mass, similar to ig, FB, etc.

Starlink is a legitimate concern because in some places there were no other choice, hence a captive audience.

Sure, but the strategy of US companies has been the same for many years.

Take for example Gmail: I remember 10 years ago it was free even for companies up to 100 users, then 50, then 10, then 0... The same with Google Maps, before it was free and later, after reaching a large user base, they changed the terms and above a certain number of visits per month it is a paid service.

Nothing wrong with that of course, but once you are inside their services, they make it really difficult to change providers. It is possible, of course, but in some cases it requires a relevant effort and many prefer to pay after being lured with very different promises.

I recently read the story of how Google took over Yahoo! as a search engine, they used a "Troy horse" ... and when Yahoo! discovered what happened it was too late.

Back to Github and MS ... MS has a very long history of trying to boycott Linux in any way possible (and I also remember what they did to BeOS) ... I think these are very valid reasons not to trust them. They didn't buy GitHub because they're nice and want to help open source ... the first thing they did was kill the Atom IDE. VS is full of trackers,yes it is open source, but also a mean to steal data and information directly from the computer of the developer.

The main problem for me here is the lack of principles, values. The only principle they follow is to try to become overly rich in some way. The US companies have a long history of trying in every legal and almost legal way to avoid paying taxes.

Until a few years ago, Amazon was always in loss in Italy because they transferred the profits (as inflated costs) to their subsidiary in Ireland and the Italian taxpayers gave back every year millions of Euros to Amazon as tax credits. This is not capitalism ...

Thanks, yeah the problem is the things done beyond code-hosting: Authn/z, issues, PRs, community, links pointing at Github URLs.

I wish there was a way to automatically mirror those things to Codeberg as a backup. For issues/PRs that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Gickup mirrors most of these things. Not sure about PRs, but it can mirror issues, wiki, and all your branches.

GitHub Actions, the issues system, pull request history, discussions, wiki.

Truth is, GitHub has a whole suite of really great features that's hard to move. Especially for open sourced projects/communities

The number of people who don’t know git is decentralized and instead equate git with GitHub is staggering. Glad to see that’s not the case with parent, but seeing people thinking you must have a GitHub account to use git at all is very common.

Launchpad.net offers project management and git code hosting and is run by a UK company (Canonical).

> launchpad.net

Are they still alive? i am somewhat hard-opponent of git, and still use bazaar - now breezy - as main repo storage, and only keep github as copy for PR, eh public relations, i.e. for jobhunt.

Are they still project-based? instead of person-based? It's the Person-based thing a-la-social-network that rocketed github into skies.. not git or MS

For your first question yes, Launchpad.net. For all the others, go have a look :)

I'm with you there. I still use Github regularly, but I recently spent time setting up Gickup to mirror all my repos to codeberg. I'm also looking at the git-sync tool to just backup all my github repos locally.

Great thing about git is it's distributed. I use Gitlab as my main repo, but I set Github as a remote, and I keep a copy on my hosted version of Gitlab. If Github disappears tomorrow I'd lose my issue tracking but that's about it.

You can use codeberg.org as an alternative to GitHub. Theirs software is Open Source, so you can even host it yourself.

I'm in the U.S. and doing the same. While EU laws don't protect me as well as they would someone on the correct side of the pond, I do still benefit from better integrity and transparency.

Would you be up for making recommendations?

for plain e-mail, recommend migadu.com (swiss) . They do only that

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one thing that seems tricky though, is smartphone OS software. Apple + Google is on like 99% of everything. i went few years with Sailfish, all fine.. but they support only 5y+ old devices, for a reason or another.. and i got tired of waiting, and switched to Android. hmmm

Fastmail as well. they are Australian.

The AABill hits hard against Australia being a useful jurisdiction alternative to the US. Heck this law has made it impossible to hire any Australian National into security critical positions outside AUS. And the same law made services by fastmail and Atlassian suspect.

I bought an used phone and an used tablet supported by LineageOS. I installed e/OS (derived from LineageOS) on the phone and LineageOS on the tablet. The hardware is like new and with "debloated" software it works very well.

Sure ! Here you can find a list of alternatives :

https://european-alternatives.eu/

I self hosting almost everything, but for a complete suite of services take at look at Infomaniak : https://www.infomaniak.com/en

Protonmail (https://proton.me/mail) or Tutanota (https://tuta.com/) for end-to-end encrypted emails, Filen (https://filen.io/) for encrypted Cloud Storage

Filen is becoming pretty awesome not only as worde alternative but as best sync storage period (and its e2e). They dobt have teams/bussines yet but its comming for sure.

Infomaniak is great email.

FYI Proton mail (or, they claim, just the CEO) is pro Trump.

To me this is a simplification. The CEO applauded a hiring decision. His social media team amplified it.

Here’s the tweet: https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660

Some have interpreted this as a political signal. The Intercept article provides additional context and takes a more critical view: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

Would you mind sharing some of your favorites for us Yanks? Some of us like privacy too.

Protonmail and Tutanota are the two big ones with e2ee

This site is great for finding alternatives to any piece of software (not just OSS)

https://alternativeto.net/

Protonmail is pro Trump.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

specifically they said

> Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.

Based on their comment it seems like they're pro-left, anti-liberal more than anything. They lament the Dem party's decision to reject Bernie in favor of corporate Democrats

They never once promoted Trump though

As a starting point I enjoyed https://european-alternatives.eu/

I don't know how to degoogle at this point. 90% of my registered accounts across the internet are with my Gmail account because I didn't want them tied to my private email.

One at a time.

If you have the time and are interacting with the account, take the second to change it away from gMail. Insisting on doing them all immediately is setting up a Herculean task that'll almost certainly leave you demoralized. This gets your most-used (and presumably most important) accounts first,and feels much smaller and more manageable.

After 6 (or 18, whenever) months of this you can summon some motivation to change over the last 20 accounts and be done with it.

You should probably spend some time on changing that. The only thing keeping me inside the Google ecosystem is my university and I hate that since they are paying for it anyway, so it makes absolutely no sense if not for it being the lazy way of doing things. Why choose to be lazy when it's clearly doing more harm than good? I managed to install android with microg and it has worked flawlessly for 4 years now. There are many options to do this of course, but they all require a lot of time to set up. Still a better alternative than being locked up under Google.

There's an entire subreddit dedicated to helping people degoogle. One of the hardest things to get rid of is Google Maps as there's no real alternative that's as good.

https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/

I haven’t touched Google maps in ages - I use Apple Maps which is decent these days (not the dumpster fire it was at launch - and even so, I used it back then, if only to de google a bit).

If the point is to avoid US companies this won’t be useful, but if the point is to avoid Google specifically, it is an option.

Open Street Map has come a long way. It's no Google Maps, but it's serviceable.

I think increase in userbase and donations will eventually make it better. We just have to show up for them.

Years ago, when I saw the invitation "Sign in with your Google account" popping up on every site, I suspected it was a trap to hold users hostage. Take a private email address and move away from Gmail one service at time.

My family has <ourlastname>.com that we registered in 1996, but for email, I mostly use my own mail-related domain name (<word>mail.com), which I use for all pseudonymous accounts.

Am I missing some big news that happened in the past weeks which threatens EU user's privacy? Or is this political wind happening in US so you decide to switch ? I am reading a lot more about Russia and NATO in this thread.

In my case, privacy is not the main issue because I have been self-hosting almost all my services for many years. It is about what is just, moral and right according to my own principles : honesty, respect, trust and fairness.

I don't want to continue to contribute to making richer companies that try in every possible way to steal data and wealth from their customers and other nations with unfair behavior at the edge (or beyond the edge) of the law.

And if that is not enough to also use every possible way to manipulate the people's beliefs with false claims and evil psychological tactics.

From what I understand from here (I live in the Netherlands), handing over your data to US-based companies has been uncertain in terms of privacy for a long time. The US appears to have a lot less privacy protections, and a lot more allowances for the government to access company and user data (especially when non-US persons are involved).

This makes it hard for US-companies handling data of EU citizens to comply with EU privacy regulations. Some legal provisions have been made to facilitate this, but, to answer your question, what changed recently is that the Trump administration recently effectively incapacitated the "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" that was central to these legal provisions.

Above is my interpretation of matters, for a large part based on posts by a Dutch expert in these matters, Bert Hubert. In particular see this post: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-you... and this news article it links to: https://noyb.eu/en/us-cloud-soon-illegal-trump-punches-first...