No matter what I try, they refuse which is frustrating. Even setting up a new company is not a realistic solution as the verification still requires passport.

If anybody knows an alternative, kindly leave a suggestion.

Sounds like from the requirement to live migrate you can't really afford planned downtime, so why are you risking unplanned downtime?

The issue is though, that you loose the managed part of the whole Cloud promise. For ephemeral services this not a big deal, but for persistent stuff like databases where you would like to have your data safe this is kind of an issue because it shifts additional effort (and therefore cost) into your operations team.

For smaller setups (attention shameless self-promotion incoming) I am currently working on https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/cloud/index.html which allows to deploy managed services to the Hetzner Cloud from a Docker-Compose like definition. E.g. a PostgreSQL database with automatic backup and disaster recovery.

Not really, a MITM could do anything here. It's not very likely to happen here, but I think this comment shows a misunderstanding of what certificates and verification does.

They do offer VPS in the US and the value is great. I was seriously looking at moving our academic lab over from AWS but server availability was bad enough to scare me off. They didn't have the instances we needed reliably. Really hoping that calms down.

This reasoning does not add up. They could simply say they needed to move somewhere cheaper, like Hetzner. Inflation is still high but getting lower. Weakened Turkish Lira part is not correct because dollar is artificially suppressed for a very long time.