A lot of people have a very unrealistic picture of what government budgets are like.
my $12/year VPS does better than us-east-1
quality varies
My point is that NOT hosting it yourself (as a government) costs WAY more in the long run. See my points above.
The same goes for companies in Europe who literally host their trade-secrets (designs, sales, the entire company) on US-servers (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc). The US is the home of their competitors. Who cares about infrastructure costs if you're PAYING to give your trade secrets away to your competitor(s)?!
I mean I'm sure Xi or any other president would be happy to govern the UK in exchange for a small fee? Much more cost effective!
I'm sure the Chinese would also be more than happy to build the UK's roads and (government) buildings at a great discount.
You still don't see my point? We're talking essential infrastructure and Geo-politically highly sensitive data.
It's just completely insane to me that they would make the gov internet infrastructure completely (geopolitically) dependent on another country AND just literally give all their (citizens') data away AND pay for that "privilege"?!
I mean if the government can't host the government's websites using tech from the government's country, maybe it would be better to just forget about the whole cyberweb thing altogether? Just turn it off?