I'm sure there are much bigger and more worthwhile criticisms to be had than this.
It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway? I think you would consider other factors first.
A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
> A good critique for example is OVH lost a lot of customer data due to a fire. Where was the redundancy? That would make me think twice before switching to OVH.
I lost a VPS in that fire, but I was up and running a few hours later with a new VPS at a different OVH location.
Not to deflect blame away from OVH and their large screw up, but we should never rely only on the redundancy of the hosting provider. Even on AWS, I wouldn't trust them to not lose my data if one of their datacenters burns down.
At the time I was making regular backups to two different providers with servers somewhere else. When I noticed that it was serious, I ordered a new VPS and restored everything. If OVH itself went down, I could have used Scaleway, Hetzner, Contabo, etc.
A lack of Unicode support in 2026 is like someone coming with dirty clothes to a job interview: it might not affect too much how the work is done, but immediately raises doubts about the underlying level of professionalism.
> It's something they should fix and if they did would you suddenly switch to Scaleway?
You know why I have this screenshot? Because I literally tried to switch to "great European alternative" that is "as slick as DO".
After a third or a fourth screen, most of which felt completely isolated and disconnected from any previous ones, I gave up on the screen that couldn't handle a standard European address.
This was literally the point that I gave up.
So I went ahead... and signed up with Hetzner.
Edit
So I decided to try again. Literally the first page of account sign in tried to trick you into accepting tracking
Since I apparently had an account, I could login... So redirected to a subdomain with the same cookie popup. On a site that is solely for billing address collection
which then redirects you to a third domain with the a similar but different popup.
Which ends up on an empty page indistinguishable in "usability" from Hetzner (or worse)
That's the end of my experience of my "European DO that is Scaleway".
It was the German equivalent of the NSA, with the German equivalent of a National Security Letter, sent to Hetzner to force them to intercept this customer's traffic. The same thing happens in the USA.
The German NSA seemed unable to access the server as they only intercepted the traffic. They got a TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt by intercepting traffic. If the app had used public key pinning, and the server had full disk encryption, this wouldn't have been enough for a compromise.
And doing that at scale across hundreds of millions of users quickly becomes prohibitively expensive. So companies simplify, and reach for simpler solutions, unfortunately.
> here is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers.
Spotify has exactly zero music "directly by artists and performers". Even indie artists have to go through distributors and labels. Because without "owners" that own 60-80% of all world music, and that Spotify pays 70% of revenue to there would be no Spotify (or any music streaming service).
ATLANTIC RECORDING CORPORATION;
ATLANTIC MUSIC GROUP LLC; BAD
BOY RECORDS LLC; ELEKTRA
ENTERTAINMENT LLC; ELEKTRA
ENTERTAINMENT GROUP INC.; FUELED
BY RAMEN LLC; WARNER MUSIC
INTERNATIONAL SERVICES LIMITED;
WARNER RECORDS INC.; WARNER
RECORDS LLC; SONY MUSIC
ENTERTAINMENT; ARISTA MUSIC;
ARISTA RECORDS, LLC; ZOMBA
RECORDING LLC; UMG RECORDINGS,
INC.; CAPITOL RECORDS, LLC; and
SPOTIFY USA INC.,
Plaintiffs,
Factual Background - III
The Record Company Plaintiffs’ business model relies
in significant part on the licensing of their catalogs of sound recordings
to legitimate streaming services like Spotify.
IMO Spotify couldn't care less. The actual owners of music care.
> American startups and businesses get investor money from all over the world, including from Europe.
Ah yes, the "real business" of American startups: losing billions of dollars a year with not even a business plan to turn a profit, in hopes of being acquired by a larger entity.
> The market is far too risk-averse for a grassroots early-stage startup scene.
Or, in reality: there's literally no expectation for companies to succeed or to turn in profit in the US, and hasn't been for over a decade.
US startups now exist to do one thing hoping for exactly one of two outcomes. Do: spend unlimited investor money. Hope: to be acquired by larger entities, or to engage in VC-subsidized predatory-pricing long enough to try and kill others doing the exact same thing, and become "too big to fail".
The US continues to produce "most valuable companies" by the absolute non-sensical value called "market share" and "market capitalization".
Menawhile almost every single of those "valuable" companies are either actively harmful, or keep offloading the effects of their operations onto society.
Prime example: Uber lost 20 billion dollars, will never get them back, and offloaded all the issues of gig workers on workers themselves, or the society. It's "value" (market cap) is "175 billion dollars" (it's not)
It tends to always write Java even if it's Elixir. Usage rules help: https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html
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