I'm 100% on team "just rent VMs and run the software on there". It's not that hard, it has predictable price and performance, and you don't lock yourself into one provider. If you build your whole service on top of some weird Amazons -specific thing, and Amazon jacks up their prices, you don't have any recourse. With VMs, you can just spin up new VMs with another provider.
You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
> You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company.
Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
I've worked in places where customers (especially municipalities in Germany) have questioned the use of American hosting providers. I don't know whether it has actually prevented a deal from going through (I wasn't close enough to sales to know), but it was consistently an obstacle in some markets. This is despite everything being hosted in EU datacenters.
Isn't the reason that even if it is hosted physically in the EU, if it is an american company the data is still not safe from american spy agencies?
Yeah, something like that.