Most European companies host on US clouds by default — not by decision. AWS, Vercel and friends are excellent products, but for a European B2B company they carry three costs that rarely make it into the architecture discussion.
1. Legal exposure you didn’t choose
Under the CLOUD Act, US providers can be compelled to hand over data regardless of where the server physically sits. If you process EU customer data, that puts your GDPR story on shaky ground — Schrems II made that explicit, and every data processing agreement you sign passes that risk on to your customers.
2. Latency where your users actually are
If your customers are in Copenhagen, Berlin and Amsterdam, serving them from
us-east-1 adds 80–120ms to every uncached request. EU datacenters like Hetzner’s
Falkenstein and Helsinki nodes put you under 20ms from most of Northern Europe.
3. Cost
This one is simple: comparable compute on European infrastructure routinely costs 3–5× less than the hyperscalers. That difference is why we can offer subscription hosting at the prices we do.
What we do instead
Every OneStopDigital project ships to EU-owned infrastructure by default: Hetzner nodes, EU DNS, EU backups. Your data — and your customers’ data — never needs a transfer impact assessment, because it never leaves.