I wonder if shifting to cloud providers in the EU will lead to the rise of giant European cloud companies in both technology and infrastructure, or if this is just a short-term trend.
But I can't do that to our clients. I want to provide them with something that makes them independent from us, something they can just hire any random agency or freelancer to work on. That leaves AWS and Azure as strong options.
There's a number of European cloud providers (https://www.stackit.de looks especially interesting), but I'm looking for too-big-to-fail options. Hetzner sure is that, but you don't get managed relational databases, object storage and a couple of other things that typical web apps rely on.
I know I can host stuff like Postgres and MinIO myself on Hetzner cloud instances. But when it comes to _managed_ services for this stuff, from a too-big-too-fail provider, I'm drawing a blank when it comes to European providers right now.
Or you might consider Scaleway, who also do managed relational databases.
I have the same attitude and regularly find (sales) people not understanding why I'm doing this. They are pathologically looking for my angle. But there's none.
Of course, a lot of agencies do just that. And I've also seen more than one situation where an agency held their client hostage, not giving them access to their own code, hosting environment and what not.
Sure, it's not 100 % angle. It's also to a large degree professional ethics. But I can easily rationalise it into business value, and am probably not far off.
It's not on the level of AWS at the moment, but getting there fast.