Hi, author here. We support a diversity of different hosting providers (Google, Azure, DigitalOcean, AWS), including your own self-hosted server. It's an install script, we don't pick the host for you, that's your decision.
You can start up a machine on either of those providers and then run the install scripts locally. Plenty of people have done it. Note: this is the same answer for every hosting provider, as long as they support Ubuntu 16.04 or 17.04.
What's the proper solution to this if you need to run a legitimate service? (I'm in this spot where I'm trying to verify if old links in emails are still correct).
Move to an obscure provider? Many services block IP blocks based on registration not on prior malice.
So your recourse is to hope who ever you chose as your provider isn't big enough to get their IP block blacklisted. A great way to check is to stream Netflix using the IP address.
Grab the Alexa Top 10,000 list and curl them. You’ll be amazed at the big brand names that block you.
This has big implications if you are trying to move some of your corporate edge to “the cloud”, or even your personal edge.
AWS needs to procure and curate a group of IPs to be used for this class of use case, ensure the services that the big brands subscribe to for their web firewalls are not blocking these IPs (very like curating IPs on anti-spam blocklists for SMTP/MX).
The idea of a "clean" IP range is great, but it won't help little guys like us. Amazon can either:
1. Make it available only to Fortune 500s or AWS accounts with a monthly spent >$X million; heavy penalties and even legal action for anyone caught spamming. This way the IP range stays clean, but is out of reach for little guys like us trying run an VPN edge.
2. Make it available to everyone. But then spammers will farm AWS accounts and abuse the clean IP range until it is banned just like any other AWS IP range.
I'm not sure what you're looking for in terms of examples, but I've had external tests for scraping code on different sites. We had to slowly disable tests that were failing because the sites were testing the request with a reCAPTCHA.
Last month Netflix blocked my Linode VPN from accessing local content, it took them surprisingly long.
But I guess it is worth it to try out smaller hosting providers, or even self-host. I did consider a Raspberry Pi at my parents home (they live in a different country).
Try a small VPS provider in your area. There are many boutique ones. ARP Networks in Los Angeles is one I've used and it's ranges seem clean. Tried DO and Vultr and got captcha hell.