Having a global monopoly on these kinds of things is part of what has let U.S. companies get away with being so anti-consumer for so long.

Plausible is a great pick though, been using it and it covers most of what you'd want from analytics unless you need GA/GTM tied to ad campaigns.

Is it to support local/European companies - Great. Is it because you don't want to be at risk of the US and the CLOUD Act - Not so great. Any company that has servers in the US (which Hetzner and basically all CDNs do) are still vulnerable to the CLOUD Act and that includes servers in Europe.

I'm American and IMO, we should also take a look at whether we need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I've been on Azure for ages (they had those free $150/month startup credits something like 10 years ago?), but I finally moved off last year.

I shopped around and landed on Hetzner's Ashburn US servers. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, containers, some relatively complex .NET SaaS apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity: I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was "Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it".

Yes, you can get cheap servers but then you've to self-host and manage a bunch of services that you could get for pennies on the dollar in AWS.

There are hundreds of datacenter providers and yet, most are absolute garbage when it comes to customer support, problem resolution, you get really old hardware, many times you have to send an email and wait weeks because they don't have a self-service UI, SLA is a joke, etc.

You can do it, it's just gonna be a nightmare and you'll spend more time/money on it.