In every SKU I've ever looked at / priced out, all of the AWS NA regions have ~equal pricing. What's cheaper specifically in us-east-1?
> Europe-friendly
Why not us-east-2?
> Many Amazon features are available in that region first and then spread out to other locations.
Well, yeah, that's why it breaks. Using not-us-east-1 is like using an LTS OS release: you don't get the newest hotness, but it's much more stable as a "build it and leave it alone" target.
> It's also a region where other cloud providers and hosting companies offer their services. Often there's space available in a data center not far from AWS-running racks.
This is a better argument, but in practice, it's very niche — 2-5ms of speed-of-light delay doesn't matter to anyone but HFT folks; anyone else can be in a DC one state away with a pre-arranged tier1-bypassing direct interconnect, and do fine. (This is why OVH is listed on https://www.cloudinfrastructuremap.com/ despite being a smaller provider: their DCs have such interconnects.)
For that matter, if you want "low-latency to North America and Europe, and high-throughput lowish-latency peering to many other providers" — why not Montreal [ca-central-1]? Quebec might sound "too far north", but from the fiber-path perspective of anywhere else in NA or Europe, it's essentially interchangeable with Virginia.
