First Pass Company Setup
A lean, privacy-respecting stack for a new company — fully hosted in Europe, for a few euros a month.
Clearly, I’ve just started a new company 😁. Since this is not the first time I’ve done that, I knew that there’s a lot of ‘things’ you need to do that have nothing to do with your actual work but with getting an actual company of the ground. Over the past couple of years I’ve done everything in the cloud, AWS in particular. For my new company I wanted to see however if I could do things in Europe, because I like to spend my money close to home. So since I now have had a first hand look at what it takes, I figured I would take you all along for the ride to see what it really takes to run your company on European tech.
I’ve made good progress, but we’re not there yet as you’ll see. But this just means that I might follow this up as I tackle other services.
Email — Soverin 🇳🇱
First things first, I need people to be able to reach me through email. Email is not something I’m willing to host myself, while it might be trivial to get working, it is hard to get right. And in the worst case scenario, all your mails will go to peoples’ spam folders…
So, for email I went with Soverin, a Dutch provider based in Amsterdam. They offer custom domain email hosting for a few euros per month with no ads, no data mining, and a clean privacy policy.
Setup was painless: point your MX records at their servers, verify your domain, and you’re done. They support standard protocols (IMAP/SMTP), which means any proper email client works.
On the client side I use Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s open source, runs on all platforms, and handles multiple accounts well. No Electron bloat, no telemetry — just a solid mail client that does exactly what it should.
The combination of Soverin + Thunderbird gives you full control: email stays in the EU, you own your domain, and you’re not locked into any proprietary ecosystem.
Cost: ~€3/month for Soverin.
Website — Hetzner VPS 🇩🇪
This one might seem a bit controversial. Why on earth would I run a site like this on a VPS. Yes, this is a completely static site, no server side processing whatsoever. There are plenty of options for hosting static sites like Github pages for example. However those aren’t European and a website is just a start, I have many other things to run as well. If your company just needs a website and nothing else, this might not be the setup for you.
The site runs on a VPS with Hetzner. Their data centres are in Germany and Finland, and they’re well known for having some of the best price-to-performance in the European VPS market.
This site is a static Jekyll build, so the server requirements are minimal — a small Hetzner instance is more than enough. Nginx serves the static files, and Certbot handles the SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt. Yes, technically Certbot is run by a US non profit but this is good enough for me.
Coming from the cloud, this means some actual server management but running a static site isn’t the hardest. More details on that later.
Cost: ~€3/month depending on the instance size.
Git hosting 💪
A version control system is unavoidable, and since for my own company I need exclusive access just for myself I have a lot of options. For this I decided to self host forgejo on that same VPS. It runs in a docker container and is only accessible through my pre-existing SSH tunnel.
This forgejo instance serves all my coding and documentation needs. Anything that I want to keep can go in there, it’s versioned and backed up.
What I haven’t solved for
There are a few things that I still depend on cloud/big tech:
- domain registration, currently in AWS. This should be easy to change though
- calendar, business versus personal calendar as my personal calendar is with Google
- github, I still have a github account and some of my own code lives there, some of this code needs to be public facing though
This is the absolute minimum. As the company grows I will be adding other services, I’ll add follow up posts as I add those.