Now within European hosting

It has again been a bit of a while since the last update, but life happens as it does. While a lot stays the same the world has changed quite a bit. It is sad that I have to take a bit serious stance in this post that isn’t about all this happy gaming and retro stuff.

On the positive we are seeing people abandoning the corporate social media platforms, and lots of folks have moved to services such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Matrix. There is also movement towards alternate search engines such as DuckDuckGo, or paid search engines such as Kagi.

This kind of change was almost unimaginable say, five years ago, despite already being clear that the corporate platforms were in a clear downspiral regarding their respect to their users. But now the change is happening.

What also has changed is the hosting scene: if you live outside the US you have to really consider a lot where you put your stuff. Earlier on I had ended up using Vercel because it was easy to setup Astro based sites there. Yes, I let convenience win, a rather human thing. And while it is still equally easy to do so I’m far less sure I want to continue doing that. Besides we now have services even on Europe that have made it easy to setup services, such as Statichost. And that is where we are hosted now!

So we are now hosted in Europe in a service provided by fully European company and is thus within EU jurisdiction. Considering the status of the world this is a rather sane thing to do.

For a more comprehensive list of alternate services in Europe you can check European alternatives to popular services. Note that some of the listed companies on that site are actually owned by an US based company, so if you want to be extra sure that you won’t get issues and that your money doesn’t up in the US then double check what you are committing to.

Finally, this isn’t about being against all US companies. This is about security and privacy. As things are we can’t know what happens to the laws in the US, and they’re a lot behind the EU. And that is why it is hard to do business with any US company. So personally in the future I will deal with only smaller US companies, and only for stuff, not for data.

Take care and drink water!