Email, webhosting, green energy, GDPR, Spotify, accessibility

Last updated on the 10.01.26 at 12:19 EET

Email, webhosting

During the last month I have begun switching from Gmail to two European email providers, Tuta and Mailbox.org. Let’s go straight to the main point: the switch has a price to be paid in money: ~6€ / month in total for both accounts. I decided to have two accounts because I’m still testing the two services, and to divide my emails among two different providers to reduce the possibility of spam, by using different aliases. Both services are funded with subscriptions, and not by using their users’ accounts as selling advertisement spaces.

I also moved this website from GitHub to Zoner, a Finnish web hosting company which costs me, including the domain, around 45€ / year. Is it expensive? Not really. All together, it is ~115€ / year, still much less than what I paid with Wix, with whom I had my website before GitHub. For the price of two cappuccinos in Finland every month, I have the most important elements of my digital presence based in Europe.

All these services—Tuta, Mailbox.org, and Zoner—run on 100% green energy. Concerning the consumption of my website, I’ve been optimizing it to minimize bandwidth usage when loading YouTube videos, Bandcamp embeds, and the gallery page. I also removed Spotify embeds and closed my paid subscription, saving a further 148€ / year, as streaming in general is bad for the environment and for the music economy.

GDPR and cookies

During the last days I finally had the time to implement a proper cookie compliance system for this website, as defined by the GDPR law. According to the directive, a website must:

• Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
• Provide accurate and specific information about the data each cookie tracks and its purpose in plain language before consent is received.
• Document and store consent received from users.
• Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies.
• Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.

Like most people, for a long time I found the cookie banner a nuisance. However, when I had to implement it myself, I realised how important it is. While testing my website, I was astounded by the quantity of cookies for each YouTube embed. I’m planning to copy my video content from YouTube to PeerTube, in particular to a server called MakerTube. Similarly, Spotify collects a lot of information from the user; for this reason, I removed the Spotify embeds and left only the Bandcamp ones, which are much less intrusive.

Since I’m here, I’d like to stress that my website does not use any analytics tools (such as Google Analytics)! I only use Google Search Console to make sure the website is being found. I’m sincerely uninterested in knowing how many people see my website: I want this to be an island in which the reader is not tracked and whose information won’t be used to feed the economy of a reprehensible and dysfunctional system such as the current technofeudalism we live in.

Spotify

As mentioned, I cancelled my Spotify subscription and for 90€ I bought a second-hand Hiby R3 Pro Saber. I am enjoying listening to music in high quality format, via Bluetooth or wired, with all my music on an SD card, and it is absolutely great! I have thousands of CDs that I’m slowly converting to FLAC, and I’m buying digital downloads from Qobuz. I think criticism of Spotify is widely understood by now, so I won’t dwell on it further.¹

TODO: accessibility

There is still work to be done on this website, in particular concerning accessibility issues. Lately I’ve become more aware of how some people rely on screen readers. My website has at the time of writing quite a few important areas of improvement:

• Implement tab-based navigation throughout the website.
• Better contrast between the link text and the background.
• A descriptive title for the YouTube and Bandcamps embeds.

More hopefully soon, thanks for reading!

Footnotes