Like a lot of Europeans, I realise that the US isn't a reliable partner anymore.
I am just talking about myself here, and not my employer, or my family.
I do use a lot of services that are based in the US, and some I will probably not migrate in the near future.
But when I receive a bill, it is a good moment to consider if it is a candidate for migration.
Synology C2 to Hetzner Storagebox
C2 is a backup service for Synology NAS. It is very conveniently integrated in the system, very reliable, and easy to use. It is also pretty expensive.
I did run out of my 2TB backup space recently, and had to consider to either upgrade or to use a new service.
After a bit of searching I found the Hetzner Storagebox service. It is basically a very restricted Linux server that you can use to store files on. It supports SSH and rsync (and some more), which is good enough for most backup use cases.
Hyper Backup, which is the Synology backup software, supports rsync directly and it was pretty easy to set up.
As the Storagebox gives me 5TB of storage for less money than I paid previously, I still had a lot of room for other backups, which made me look into improving the backup of my desktop and laptops.
Restic seems to be the current hip command line backup solution. It is available as package on Fedora and pretty easy to use. It also backups with SSH and therefore supports the Storagebox.
AWS Route53 to Hetzner DNS
Another bill that came in.
This was straightforward and surprisingly Hetzner DNS hosting is completely free.
AWS S3 Static Websites to Hetzner Cloud
OK, the change of DNS would break my static websites. These are just archived copies of older services I used to run. Route 53 together with S3 can host these without any server being involved.
Hetzner doesn't support this, so I had to get a small virtual machine to host the sites.
I created an Ansible project to set up the server and Caddy to host the pages.
This meant I was a Linux admin again. (SSH & Caddy are constantly getting probed, that was something I didn't miss)
Blogger to Hugo
I have been using Blogger / Blogspot for 20 years. It is easy to use, free, and very reliable. It doesn't have any fancy features, but I really don't need them anyway.
Since I now had a server serving static sites, I thought I could join the cool kids with their static site generators. Hugo seems to be pretty popular and looked like it would work for me.
I used Google Takeout to get the data from the blogs I have. Except of this one they were abandoned long ago.
Claude wrote a quick import script for me and the content seems to have mostly survived. I was even able to merge two different blogs into this one to keep the history.
Everything seems to be working so far.
One thing I lost were comments on the blog. They were never active anyway.
Google Analytics to Nothing?
I didn't include Google Analytics tags in the migration. I am really not that interested in the statistics. I haven't looked at them for a long time.
I guess I could look at the Caddy logs, or install some web analytics that isn't quite as problematic in the future.
Conclusion
That was a quite satisfying start. And also a drop in the ocean.
I use Android, all kinds of Google services, Strava, Garmin, …
It will take a while for me to get rid of those. But for some there will be choices that will be even better and cheaper.