Long story short: I’ve switched to using Actalis ^[1], the Italian Certification Authority and eIDAS ^[2]-qualified Trust Service Provider owned by the Aruba Group.

Recent geopolitical shifts and events, such as the controversy around the International Criminal Court (ICC) ^[3] or ‘rogue’ devices found in Chinese solar inverters raises cybersecurity alarm in Europe ^[4], have sparked a lot of talk about digital autonomy. The European Commission, acted on 3 June 2026, by adopting an ambitious set of measures to bolster the EU’s digital autonomy ^[5]. I simply followed this conversation from the sideline, as I considered myself digitally autonomous since I’m self hosting my personal domain on servers in my meter cupboard. Until last weekend when I decided to do a reality check on my personal domain.

I take a strict approach to digital autonomy, I try to self-host as much as possible. For whatever I can (or will) not self-host, I prefer using Dutch or European services. Relying on services outside The Neterlands or the European Union carries important implications regarding geopolitical jurisdiction, legal compliance, digital sovereignty, and data privacy. There’s geopolitical and sanctions risks, where non-EU services may be forced to revocations or bans of countries, organisastions or individuals. Relying too much on a specific service may create a single point of failure, where any infrastructure disruption, policy pivot, or political intervention could technically disrupt foreign digital infrastructure. Data privacy and surveillance laws of non-EU services may expose your data to foreign goverments.

I registered my domain in 2015 and have used Let’s Encrypt from the start. It owes my gratitude for fundamentally changing web security, by developing the ACME protocol for issuing certificates. Even though it’s a non-profit certificate authority, it’s run by the US-based Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) thus I flagged it as orange in the below table. Almost 90% ^[6] of all certificates are currently issued by Let’s Encrypt.

To practice what I preach I looked for european alternatives ^[7]. Registering with Actalis and generating new certificates for my domain took me less than an hour.