[setquk]

Or just two DCs in active/active.

Still works out cheaper for workloads than AWS does even factoring staff in at this point.

AWS always turns into cost and administrative chaos as well unless it is tightly controlled which in itself is costly and difficult the moment you have more than one actor. GCP probably the same but I have no experience with that. Very much more difficult to do this when you have physical constraints.

Two man startup, perhaps but I think the transition should go:

VPS (linode etc) for MVP, colo half rack, active/active racks two sites then scale out however your workload requires.