I’m part of an aging group of nerds called Pils & Programmering. We formed in University back in 2012 with the goal of gathering like-minded students and professionals to drink beer and do some programming. While the group was quite active in real life back then, we gradually became more of a chat group as people got families and jobs. From 2012 to 2025 we used the free hosted version of Slack for our chat. This worked quite well. But with political polarization and events happening, and Slack becoming more profit oriented, it was clear that free American services was no longer a good bet. It was time to move on to something more sovereign.
Part 0: Choosing a chat application
So what chat application should we use? IRC is a classic and has been around since the early days of the internet. XMPP based chat servers like ejabberd also have a long history. But to be honest we wanted something that kind of mirrored the experience of using Slack. Mattermost seemed like a good fit as it is a self-hosted Slack alternative. It is open source (well, sort of), has a nice web interface, and is relatively easy to set up. My only gripes with Mattermost is that is seems more like an Open Core product than a true open source project. But for now it seems to be the best option available.
Part 1: Choosing a hosting provider
Initially I set up the chat server on a dedicated server hosted by Gigahost in Norway. This had some benefits, among them being that the server was in the same country as us. But it was increasingly clear I did not have the time to manage a self-hosted Postgres and backup setup.
So I started looking for a hosting provider in Europe and quickly settled on the familiar Scaleway. Scaleway is a french subsidiary of the Iliad group. With European owners, and a drive to build a European sovereign cloud, it was a natural choice.
Part 2: Choosing Scaleway setup
Considering Mattermost wants to run quite continuously I figured we wanted to host it on a VM rather than their serverless container offering. Scaleway offers a variety of instances, but for our tiny chat group a pretty small DEV1-S instance was more than enough. This instance is approximately €6.5 per month before IPV4 address, which is quite affordable for our group. While you can get cheaper hardware with Scaleway’s dedicated servers, it was nice to have the option to snapshot and restore the instance if needed.
For the database I wanted something managed as I did not want to deal with the hassle of setting up backups and restore procedures.
Scaleway offers a managed PostgreSQL service called Scaleway PostgreSQL which is a good fit for our use case.
As we’re a tiny group and uptime isn’t all that important, I decided to go with the cheapest possible option.
You can select the old instance type DB-DEV-S, standlone mode (no high availability), and 5K IOPS block storage for €12.38 per month.
All in all a pretty good deal for a managed database.
On the old Gigahost server I had just configured Mattermost to use local file storage. For the new setup I noticed both Mattermost and Scaleway offered S3. So I decided to use the S3 storage for the chat server. This allows me to easily migrate to a different hosting provider if needed as the only thing stored on disk is the config.
The Setup
Here’s a diagram of the final architecture:
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Scaleway (Amsterdam) │
│ │
│ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ DEV1-S Instance (~€6.5/mo) │ │
│ │ ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │
│ │ │ Mattermost Server │ │ │
│ │ │ (config on disk) │ │ │
│ │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ └────────────────────┼─────────────────────┼─────────────┘ │
│ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ ┌─────────────▼──────────┐ ┌──────▼──────────┐ │
│ │ Managed PostgreSQL │ │ S3 Storage │ │
│ │ DB-DEV-S (€12.38/mo) │ │ (files, media) │ │
│ │ - Standalone mode │ │ │ │
│ │ - 5K IOPS storage │ │ │ │
│ └────────────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ │
│ │
└───────────────────────────────────▲───────────────────────────┘
│
│
┌─────────┴──────────┐
│ Users/Clients │
│ (web, desktop, │
│ mobile) │
└────────────────────┘Total cost: ~€20/month for a fully managed, EU-sovereign chat setup (not inluding a domain and SMTP). Note that the price will increase as your storage increases. But this setup should scale well for at least 50 people.
Conclusion
In this post I’ve taken you through the setup we used to migrate our chat to a EU-sovereign, partially managed setup. Scaleway is a great provider and I’m happy to support them in their quest to build a European sovereign cloud. If you are looking to migrate away from American tech giants, Scaleway is a great option. All of our users are in Europe, so it makes sense to host the chat server in Europe. This post did not cover the exact config and setup, but I trust self-hosters to figure it out.