I have to setup things myself on AWS, too, but I can use standard tools like Chef or Puppet and don't have to deal with manual service requests or running a mash-VPN myself to connect my physical machines over a single network just to have some "private" networking.

I think DigitalOcean is a nice example of how fast you iterate. They did many things right, some wrong. But the don't settle. They are building new things like private networking, their v2 api, IPv6 (hetzner doesn't provide v6 on vservers iirc EDIT: they do now).

The default answer I got when asking for features that e.g. US, UK or FR based ISPs already have is: "But it's not hosted in Germany! The cloud is insecure!"

Today we know, that it doesn't matter, where in Europe you're located as intelligence services cooperate and share all data. So Hetzner for example is required to provide access to german intelligence services by law. They share it with the NSA. So it's FUD.

So maybe this provides some insight of my kind of emotional initial posting.