Migrating to the EU

(rz01.org)

Comments

dinowars 23 March 2026
> First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaround

I use mailbox for a long time, one account for 2.50EUR/month with multiple custom domains and I can send emails from any address. To send from a different address the process didn't really seem different than other providers.

From Thunderbird mobile on Android I just add a new sender identity. If I need to send from webmail, similarly I just add a new alternative sender. Are these the workarounds you mentioned?

deaux 23 March 2026
https://bunny.net/ seems solid as a Cloudflare and S3 replacement. I'm not affiliated but they deserve more mentions in these threads.
_pdp_ 23 March 2026
Our company started migrating our tech stack from USA to EU. We are about 90% there with a few small dependencies that could be resolved but we have not yet tackled.
dwedge 23 March 2026
> For various reasons

Because it's trending. Likely the same reason they ended up outside the EU in the first place.

I find this to be a non article. They moved from Google to Google and Apple, installed Graphene but installed the play store for a "significant number of apps", and didn't even consider self hosting email or git.

I've probably seen a dozen of these articles now, not to mention posts on LinkedIn, and it's a shame that there is almost never any real substance to them because on the surface it's an interesting thought experiment

darthcloud 23 March 2026
As a Canadian, I’ve been thinking since last year about migrating to non-US services and applications.

My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.

They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.

I started with this:

Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / Drive

NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak

Google Maps → TomTom

Google Chrome → Vivaldi

Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)

GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)

I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.

I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.

Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.

Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.

TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.

Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.

Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.

_osud 23 March 2026
How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review? Some EU courts will not exclude illegally obtained evidence either, so challenging the warrant later on will be pointless.

Oh, and you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries. This is especially concerning given recent ECJ rulings increasingly directing courts in receiving nations to blindly defer to the requesting party when dealing with EAWs, EIOs and similar.

Worth considering when hosting in the EU.

BrunoBernardino 23 March 2026
For search, I'd suggest Ecosia [1] or Qwant [2] if you don't mind ads, or Uruky [3] if you don't want them (full disclosure, I've created Uruky with my wife).

[1]: https://ecosia.org

[2]: https://qwant.com

[3]: https://uruky.com

jwr 23 March 2026
I can recommend:

* Hetzner.de for servers (I've been using their physical servers for many years now, incredible performance per € spent)

* Fernand as your CRM, it's smooth and nice and so much better and faster than all the zendesks and freshdesks it's not even funny. (https://getfernand.com/)

* AISLER if you design electronics and need to make PCBs (https://aisler.net/)

axegon_ 23 March 2026
I've migrated just about everything I was relying on a while back. Not only that but I've self-hosted just about everything, with the exception of my email and I've moved whatever I have public on github to codeberg. With the exception of github pages, though I plan on doing that too, when I find motivation to going through the tedious DNS management. I've been on and off on qwant and ecosia for search(lately ecosia has been stepping up their game it seems). But I am considering switching over to searxng, I just want to put it behind a squid proxy somewhere remote, away from my apartment.
vertnerd 23 March 2026
Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.
dragochat 23 March 2026
how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_? with email accounts as the roots of trust for many things, i'd really wanna know how can I get a trustworthy one not-attached to eithern an unstable system (US), or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...

and ofc, non-CN too

I_am_tiberius 23 March 2026
Codeberg is only for FOSS projects. Is there some good European hosting provider for git? I really don't want to self host git.
appstorelottery 23 March 2026
I would add Hetzner for hosting. German based, solid in my experience with virtual servers.
whiterose1214 23 March 2026
Lot of discussion about different privacy laws across jurisdictions, and while I understand a lot of users have different approaches to privacy and opinions on political matters, realistically if your threat model is the NSA or some other three-letter agency:

a) migrating to a different jurisdiction isn't realistically a massive barrier for them (related: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)

b) if they're taking the time to get a "secret" warrant for you, you have much larger issues. It's like building a car that's resistant to hellfire missiles. It'll help, but if you're getting hellfire missiles thrown at you, you have much larger problems than the structural integrity of your vehicle.

Realistically, there's a reason that a lot of these services are underused. Many of them lack reliable support, many of them aren't as useful, and the vast majority lack the interconnectivity that makes services like Drive and Gmail so useful to the vast majority of consumers. In addition, if your evaluation of the utility of US companies is based on which party is in power, you should know that both parties equally don't care about your privacy, and never have.

tonydav 23 March 2026
For mail I've been using migadu.

I self host most services: contacts, calendar, git, ..

Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.

Tried hetzner, but it wouldn't allow me to create an account. Ovh it is.

I haven't thought about registrars, I don't think it matters for most tld. (Moniker, porkbun)

awongh 23 March 2026
> The reasons for this are [...] improved data protection.

Didn't the Snowden leaks just prove that the NSA is listening to most things anyway?

I suppose this has more to do with the specific case of a lower-level agency being able to access your data, rather than it being actually secure?

I get that people would be concerned about that scenario, but also it seems like a little bit of hair-splitting.

XCSme 23 March 2026
Shameless plug: if you think about switching from Google Analytics/Hotjar, check out my project[0] (built in EU, started in Romania, now working on it remotely in Netherlands).

If not, happy to hear any criticism or the alternatives you decided to go with instead.

[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com

Raed667 23 March 2026
> set up catch-all addresses but also send emails from any email address I wanted

I have been frustrated with ProtonMail for this exact reason, i have a catch all but responding is a hassle where i have to manually create an address.

I wish Proton would just allow me to respond to an email from the address it was addressed to

andix 23 March 2026
Is there a good tool to automatically (and continuously) mirror all GitHub repositories to another provider? Something with GH API integration that also catches newly created projects/repos?

Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.

atoav 23 March 2026
One tip in the EU is to consider just renting a Hetzner Storage Share. This is a 1TB (or more) Nextcloud that Hetzner manages for you for 5.11 Euros per month.

A Nextcloud can give you many things at once, file syncing, file shares, contact syncing, calendar syncing, etc.

I have been using this for years now after having hosted my own Nextcloud instance. The space and performance they give you for that price is unbeatable with nearly no downsides. The one downside is that you can't just ssh into the server, but you can even run occ managment commands via their web interface. It is an absolute no-brainer.

s_dev 23 March 2026
https://european-alternatives.eu/

I recommend Scaleway for cloud hosting. I recently migrated from Digital Ocean who I really loved, to Scaleway and have I have to say impressed with both dashboard interface and pricing so far.

In work we still use AWS but everything is hosted in eu-west (Ireland) in AWS EU Sovereign cloud but not sure how truly compliant this is in a CloudAct vs GDPR showdown.

I've yet to migrate from namecheap but planning on moving my domains to inwx. My MacBook Pro will be hard to replace so that will be years away. Nothing phones look cool but I would like to go with EU solutions rather than British ones. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-sep-ii-2026 looks cool but some the HackerNews guys have been quite critical so I'm still considering what those next devices will be.

exiguus 24 March 2026
My next phone will be also one that is supported by GraphenOS.

Currently, my private setup is:

- VPN: Windscribe [CA]

- AI: Mistral [FR]

- Phone: De-Googled Fairphone [NL] (F-Droid/Aurora/OpenStreetMap)

- Search: Self-hosted SearXNG + YACY (since ~10 years / good setup & documentation)

- Domain Provider: INWX [DE] (since +10 years / good setup & documentation)

- DNS: Self-hosted AdGuard Home / dnscrypt-proxy 2 + dnsdist / resolver (since ~5y / good setup & documentation)

- Git: Self-hosted GitLab (since ~1 year / ok setup & documentation)

- Mail/Cal/Card: Self-hosted with Mailcow (since +5 years / good setup & nice documentation)

- Password Manager: Self-hosted KeePass2 + SSHFS (since +10 years / easy setup)

- Notes: Joplin + self-hosted Joplin-Server (since ~5 years / good setup & documentation)

- Feeds: Self-hosted Miniflux (since +5years / easy setup & good documentation)

- VPS/Server/Storage/Hosting: netcup [DE], Webtropia [DE], IONOS [DE], OVH [FR], Hetzner [DE], Contabo [DE]

- Browser and Mail-Client: Firefox and Thunderbird (since ~2013 - last Opera release)

Costs: ~60 EUR/month and between 2 and 4 hours of work a month to maintain.

Moving away from PayPal and Amazon is quite hard and currently I search for a Slack alternative that don't need a k8-cluster to run stable or cost >50EUR/month (playing around with Matrix, Rocket.Chat and Mattermost).

Recently, I’ve been using https://european-alternatives.eu/ a lot to help friends and family.

zenmac 24 March 2026
>For a long time, I was a satisfied Namecheap customer. They offer good prices, a wide selection of available domains, their DNS management has everything you need, and their support team has helped me quickly on several occasions. But now it was time to look for a comparable provider in the EU. In the end, I settled on hosting.de. Some of the reasons were the prices, reviews, the location in Germany, and the availability of .is domains. So far, everything has been running smoothly; support helped me quickly and competently with one issue; and while prices for non-German domains are slightly higher, they’re still within an acceptable range.

Have you tried zone.eu? Think they are related to the Nodemailer people or they acquired them. Would fit the whole Migrating to the EU theme of the article. And it is in English ;-) Couldn't really navigate the hosting.de site without using Google Translator.

hbbio 23 March 2026
Still not accepting Codeberg moral stance.

Yes, gitea (and originally gogs) are released under permissive licenses, so it's legally allowed to fork them.

But forking complete working projects with years of work, rebranding with a "good guys" attitude, and progressively erasing the name/history (mentioning a gitea fork has moved down the faq now) is not fair.

Edit: even worse, the word "fork" is not in the FAQ. It is "Comparison with Gitea" now (fork is mentioned on that page).

sobiolite 23 March 2026
I’m not with I could ever migrate away from Gmail, even if I wanted to. I have so many accounts and services linked to it.
levmiseri 23 March 2026
For a European alternative to Google Docs / Notion, we made https://kraa.io/about that might work for you if all you need is a simple editor with collab features.
gib444 23 March 2026
Not a fan of Mailbox.org. It's Nextcloud for starters. The UX is clunky. They feel a 30 day web app session expiry is perfectly fine.

I've gone back to FastMail for the time being

I think what I really want is:

- FastMail or similar for sending, and receiving new emails

- An email archive system that syncs from my main email provider, deleting from the remote anything over eg 4 weeks old

I like hosted providers for their IP reputation, spam systems, deliverability etc (and in the case of FM, the excellent web UI) but I don't like them having 15 years of my email which they can read whenever they wish. (edit: yes, I realise they could just keep copies)

Does anyone else have this kind of set up? Any recommendations to remove the pain of having a mailbox split into 2?

NoSalt 23 March 2026
> "the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection"

I have not done any research into this facet of EU laws, but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?

Nifty3929 24 March 2026
I do not feel that the EU is less likely to surveille me than anywhere else. The laws seem mostly geared toward protecting me from corporations - but those aren't the ones I mostly worry about.

The EU seems to be mandating surveillance by the government, which is a higher-order concern for me.

ellieh 23 March 2026
> Codeberg is a German-based nonprofit organization, and it’s hard to imagine going wrong with this choice.

I like what they're doing, however Codeberg's 14 day uptime is _97.05%_. I've heard from many that downtime is normal there, and is worse than GitHub (which is already... bad). This makes them a non-starter imo, until that improves.

With the current trend of things going down all the time, the best way to compete is just to be available.

madflo 23 March 2026
I have been a customer of OVH’s new Zimbra Starter service. It works for my personal and professional needs, CalDAV and ActiveSync are active. I do not use the web interface so no feedback on this.
bkolobara 23 March 2026
Shameless plug. We have been working on building a European GitHub alternative for private repos at https://lubeno.dev.
esher 23 March 2026
I don't like all the 'us against them' rhetoric going on. All that European alternatives talk is not much better than America first.
jagermo 23 March 2026
Uberspace is solid and a lot of fun to try stuff out. For domains, i would also recommend inwx.com, they have been around for ages, good prices and no-fuzz admin stuff.
vldszn 23 March 2026
Not sure if it counts, but I’m based in Warsaw, Poland (EU) and working on a free and open-source invoice generator: https://easyinvoicepdf.com

Github: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

It doesn’t have any backend and all data is stored in the browser.

brandrick 23 March 2026
Proton ticks a few of those boxes for me. Mail, VPN, Cal.
severino 23 March 2026
> First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaround, so the search continued.

I had read about other problems about this mailbox.org service, but not this one. Anyone knows what's the catch when trying to send emails from your own domain?

gib444 23 March 2026
There are reasons other than privacy to move to non-US companies: e.g. not wanting contribute to the US economy and the further expansion of US tech companies. This is my main motivation in fact.

So criticisms about these kind of posts and initiatives along the lines of "EU privacy bad too" are insufficient and are unpersuasive.

fmajid 23 March 2026
The EU is not a privacy and human rights panacea, as shown by the continuing efforts to impose Chat Control. Switzerland is no better.

Then again one of my wife’s friends is high up in the Canadian policy establishment and some of her positions on surveillance and political control over social media were chilling, and I assume widespread among the Five Eyes. Certainly the UK and Australia have deeply authoritarian policies far beyond even Trump’s wildest dreams.

Small countries like Iceland have enlightened policies but are vulnerable to coercion and in fact were militarily occupied during WW2.

mads_quist 23 March 2026
If you need an on-call / incident management platform like PagerDuty or incident.io All Quiet offers EU based Hosting and is operated from Germany:

https://allquiet.app

cdrnsf 23 March 2026
Migrating away from US services altogether is an admirable goal. In cases where that's not possible, it's still worth moving off the services and platforms offered by large tech companies.
malbs 23 March 2026
For email, I've been using migadu for a number of years now. Very happy with the service/support I get for the amount I pay per year
pelzatessa 23 March 2026
> I’ve always been a happy Mullvad customer. For 5 euros a month, I pay a Swedish company that has proven it doesn’t log any data

How did they prove that? Is such proof even possible?

BoredPositron 23 March 2026
Blast from the past... I really miss fluxbox but I also need Wayland because of different refresh rate monitors and the last time I checked waybox wasn't there yet.
piokoch 23 March 2026
I wonder what will happen when Jordan Bardella will be new France president and Alice Weidel will be German Chancellor. Where people are going to migrate to then...
achayala 23 March 2026
I did the same! The only problem with this is the uptime of codeberg.org, it sucks haha, but that is not a problem for me. I have not critical services there.
lvales 23 March 2026
This is something I've been trying to help people and companies with excipio (shameless plug). Data and digital sovereignty are fundamental nowadays.
Aldipower 23 March 2026
For transactional email, Lettermint is a great email broadcaster from the Netherlands. Saying this as a German means they really must be good!
twoquestions 23 March 2026
For the longest time it was an economic axiom that regulations drive off businesses, and here stronger laws are directly attracting business!
loeber 23 March 2026
This stuff strikes me as misguided. Britain's Ofcom is sending censorship/deanonymization requests around the world, Germany prosecutes thousands of its citizens every year for "offensive" things said online... and you think Europe is a bastion of free speech or privacy? You might find that you have greater rights on US soil.
nopakos 23 March 2026
One concern is that if an EU company becomes very successful, it could easily be acquired by a large U.S. corporation.
retinaros 23 March 2026
migrating to a re gion that votes laws to restrict freedom of speech, wants to remove anonymity from social network and can block your bank account for opinions that do not align with european stance on things like for instance mass migrations from third world countries. Yeah seems a smart move.
_joel 23 March 2026
You can take fastmail from my cold, dead hands :D About the only thing I can rely on to actually work.
kouunji 23 March 2026
Honestly this is part of a macro trend of everyone outside the US scrambling to get off a US tech stack…these are going to be the longer term economic consequences for the country, as it is no longer seen as a safe option for any kind of data or service exposure.
canmi21 23 March 2026
Big companies never treat your data good. It's better to store it privately :(
mcswell 24 March 2026
I suppose I'm the only one who thought this article would be about moving oneself to the EU. Frankly, given the current mess in the US government (Making America Little Again), I would do that if I could swing it financially. But I'm retired, and have no kin that live or lived in the EU.
kuon 23 March 2026
For domains, spread them across multiple registrars.
sylware 23 March 2026
Slight detail: EU does not know how to design performant mobile/server/desktop CPUs (and GPUs). But they have ASML and "obsolete" foundries.
stronglikedan 23 March 2026
What a waste of time. It's all the same regardless of location. There's better things to do than worry about bogeymen.
unsupp0rted 23 March 2026
> For a long time, I was a satisfied Namecheap customer.

Other than them suddenly and arbitrarily deleting your account on a week's notice if you chose to have been born in the wrong country, they're great.

Arbitrarily because you can always email them and explain why you chose to be born in the wrong country and how you're actually one of the good ones.

But you don't understand: most of their employees are from a country that the wrong country is currently in conflict with, so they can't stand idly by while you sit there with your birth certificate hanging over you.

leftytak 23 March 2026
I'd like to get out of the matrix as much as the next guy, but I haven't found any reliable alternatives that actually provide equivalent services.

And in terms of degoogled phones, I like the idea, but the conspiracy theorist in me tells me, "hhhhmmmm, people are leaving the google / apple ecosystem, and the best phones out there for degooling is Pixel phones by google..."

That's like the best move Google made, their "free" services are the main driver for selling their phones.

silexia 23 March 2026
The EU has far worse freedom of speech laws than the US, most websites would be insane to migrate to the EU.
moltar 23 March 2026
Fastmail is Australian
pennaMan 23 March 2026
> the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection

This is laughable. The EU has the most big-tech regulatory capture friendly data laws that make it really hard for small companies to compete, nicely packaged under consumer protection pretenses.

Those same laws give the institutions of the state complete and total right to silently wiretap the digital existence of anyone, at any time, for any reason.

max_ 23 March 2026
> The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection

I don't understand why people keep saying this when Europe is more hostile towards privacy.

The constantly insist on schemes like chat control, and GrapheneOS users are often confronted by legal authorities.

They may have "the laws", but its way less trust worthy.

u8080 23 March 2026
Reminder: Hetzner/Linode were MITMing their client(jabber.ru) withour any legal basis and past prosecution: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
Invictus0 23 March 2026
Foolish blunder
ankit7000 23 March 2026
"Running a €5 Hetzner VPS in Helsinki for 1+ year — CPX22 gives 3vCPU 4GB RAM. For most indie devs the EU infra is genuinely better value than US providers at the same price point."
ta9000 23 March 2026
Frankly many in the US are over the Trump administration and I expect a massive backlash in the midterms. Do what you want of course but I think the descent of the US is slowing and there will be a return to normalcy after this admin.
sph 23 March 2026
I'm also pretty much using 100% EU services except FastMail. Nothing against the Aussies, but I'd rather use something local, with servers within the EU.

But I don't think there's anything as good as Fastmail this side of the pond, and I'm not prepared to compromise on this just yet. I might self-host email despite all the dangers the day FM decides to enshittify itself.

drstewart 23 March 2026
Another daily thread on this topic. Interesting. What makes this one unique and not exactly like every other one?
debugnik 23 March 2026
And yet the hardware had to stay all American brands, how sad we barely compete there.
dipshady 23 March 2026
hello
_the_inflator 23 March 2026
European here.

"Migrating to the EU" is serving a self-fulfilling delusion just as joining the so -called revolutionary forces after WW2 and moving to eastern Europe.

The EU does everything to de-industrialize itself and protect its ground by using surveillance tools branded as "child protection" rules.

Europeans don't have any tradition in thinking in freedom, in civil rights, in having a state that isn't there to spoil you, but grant basic service to allow you to shape your life the way you want it. Instead, Europeans hunger for "the state", thrive under more and more "protection rules" and supervision over the economy.

Anything and everything that requires financial and economic freedom is deemed suspicious and under the disguise of equality needs to be taxed into the ground.

Almost no one takes offense by the fact that the predominant topics in the EU center around perceived life-style threads all caused by one person thousands of miles away while wondering that the quality of life and public service going down the hill and every still existing local newspaper looks like an international outlet like New York Times: local topics don't exist. Anything and everything has to be linked to something that can be linked to "the fight against XYZ" not simply pragmatism or anything rational.

In Germany there is a former major party imploding in record time, having absolutely no representation anymore. And what these radicals do, is building a self-serving kraken, that checks off any and every checkmark of an totalitarian playbook.

And this shall be the basis for making my future depend an services having to exist within these given circumstances?

The genius thing about US constitution is the inherit limitation of terms. You see exactly the opposite in anything and everything in the EU and Germany. 14 or 16+ years of being in control means there was never any need to readjust.

I am more than happy and willing to move everything out of the EU.

Given the fact that europeans think, that a "Hosted in the EU" service is 100% European (whatever the term means) is some sort of discriminatory - something that is dealing with the double standard rampant in the EU.

BTW, I am still waiting for full autonomy: nothing from Github or any open source project that traces back to Github was used in this service.

European arrogance is so disgusting. Instead of simply changing the tune and accepting the fact, that different circumstances lead to different results, there is some sort of ego distorting the decision making process.

How much more evidence is needed, that the EU is lost compared to services done in the US? And you should look at the whole picture, instead of using your gut to draw conclusions.

I admire and acknowledge anything and everything that has been achieved in the US in regards to Computer Science.

I will never ever migrate to the EU. Never.

chairhairair 23 March 2026
"This way, I can enjoy YouTube ad-free and without an account."

Not having the gumption to actually give it up. Pathetic.

lynx97 23 March 2026
I find it pretty ironical that people seem to want to move to Von der Leyens vision of the future. As a EU citizen, my trust in what recently has been going down is almost non-existant.
aborsy 23 March 2026
Some of these European countries such as France are quite authoritarian. They frequently pass (update: propose/push for) laws to ban VPN and even social media, request access to private messages, etc. It seems to me the situation is equally bad in EU.
gradus_ad 23 March 2026
The EU is going to fail in the next decade or two. It is a financially and politically unsustainable patchwork that will rip apart in the great power conflict that is coming. The sick man of Europe is now Europe itself.