I built a GDPR-compliant EU cloud hosting company on bare metal — here's what I learned

I built a GDPR-compliant EU cloud hosting company on bare metal — here's what I learned

Hey IH — I'm Raul, a solo infrastructure operator based in Romania. I spent years building companies in the post-production industry — that's where my obsession with infrastructure started. Budgets were almost entirely consumed by hardware, so hiring experts wasn't an option. I learned it all myself, across domains that would normally require several specialists. IT consulting followed naturally.

A few weeks ago I launched HummingTribe (hummingtribe.com) — an EU cloud hosting provider built on bare metal in Germany, born directly from the needs of my consulting clients.

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The problem

Every time a client needed offsite backup or a workload hosted, I'd point them to AWS, Backblaze, or Wasabi — US companies, subject to the CLOUD Act, with egress fees that hide the real cost. Pull 10TB for a restore and you're looking at a $900 AWS bill.

The EU alternatives were either enterprise-only with minimum commitments and sales calls, or just Hetzner reselling with no added value. So I built the thing I kept wishing existed.

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What it is

• S3-compatible object storage — zero egress fees, works with rclone, Duplicati, Veeam, Synology, PBS. From €7.99/TB/mo.
• Shared hosting — OpenLiteSpeed, instant provisioning. From €3.99/mo.
• Cloud VPS — managed, hardened, monitored. From €34.99/mo.
• Dedicated servers — bare metal with managed services.
• Managed Backup — I configure everything, monitor daily. From €19.99/mo.

All data in Frankfurt. EU legal entity. No US company in the chain.

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The stack

Proxmox + ZFS on Hetzner bare metal, Tailscale for inter-VM comms, Garage for S3, FastAPI + PostgreSQL, Nuxt 3, Stripe-native billing, GitHub webhook deploys. No Kubernetes. Just VMs and systemd.

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What I've learned

1. Billing is harder than the product. Stripe webhooks, provisioning automation, cancellation logic — took longer than the storage product itself.

2. EU legal entity is a real differentiator. "GDPR compliant" is easy to claim. No US sub-processors, data in Germany, no CLOUD Act exposure — that's harder to fake.

3. Distribution is where I'm completely lost. I know how to build infrastructure. I have no idea how to find customers. No social media presence, no audience, no playbook. This post is me starting from zero on that front — if you have experience here I'd genuinely love to hear it.

4. The mundane stuff takes real time. Directories, listings, GSC, indexing requests — none of it is hard but it all takes time away from building.

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Where I am

Live since March 2026. A handful of paying customers, mostly from my network. Revenue is not zero but not enough to talk about yet.

If you're building in EU infrastructure, or looking for a GDPR-native S3 alternative — I'd love feedback.

AMA in the comments.

— Raul
hummingtribe.com