Reducing our reliance on $bigtech

I'm not one for politics, as anyone who knows me will tell you, but I am certainly one for trying to manage risk.

The current landscape of billianaire owned walled gardens and mass media propaganda machines is beyond ridiculous right now and it seems likely, if not inevitable, that a lot of the services we take for granted everyday may become less reliable or even completely unavailable outside of United States. That's just not a situation we like the look of.

So, we have begun thinking about the services we use, where they are hosted and what, if any, alternatives we could switch to to help limit any impacts from across the pond or in fact from any walled garden.

Yesterday we took a couple of small steps. Both myself and Mrs P signed up for new email addresses from a German email provider called tuta.com. These will be used to replace our generic Gmail accounts that we've used for years and are used as the login for many of the online services we use. The tuta.com service isn't free, but 36 Euros each for their Revolutionary plan seems like a pretty good deal. Obviously it's more expensive than a Gmail account, where all we have to trade is our privacy, but it's certianly not what we would consider overly expensive.

One further step I took was to migrate my doman hosting and DNS for the hatstand.org.uk domain. We use the domain for email (also hosted by Google) as well as for hosting this blog. The domain has been hosted by the previous provider for well over a decade and I have zero complaints with any of their services or pricing, it's just the possibility, remote though it may be, that someone pulls the plug.

I had been looking at hosting solutions for a little while and one name that came up time and time again was Mythic Beasts, a UK based hosting company offereing a number of services including domain registration, DNS hosting, VPS and dedicated servers as well as web and email hosting. Yesterday I decided it was time to stop procrastinating and just get on with it.

I registered myself a new account at Mythic Beasts and used their domain trasfer wizard to check what was required. It looked to be pretty simple and almost all things that I would be able to do myself. There was one exception. For a .uk domain, the current registrar needs to retag the domain so that the new provider can pick it up. I logged into the old providers management page and there was no way for me to set the retag value myself so I jumped into a chat session. I got the inevitable bot to start with and then after a few minutes I got hold of one of the support team who were really efficient and helpfull. I had the neccesary changes in place in a few minutes and I could already see the domain showing as registered with the new provider. The domain migration tool caught most of the existing DNS records and migrated those across with a few subdomain records I had to add manually, but the Beasts DNS wizard had already let me know that that would likely be needed.

So, that's 2 small changes made but there are many, many more to consider. We will be looking at all of the services we consume with a plan to replace them with either a #selfhosted / #localhosted solution or at the very least something hosted in either the UK or EU.

We are under no illusion, we have a long way to go but at least we've made a start.