European Managed Databases and Backends

Nhost is the closest architectural match — Postgres with auth, storage and an API layer on top, hosted in the EU. If what you actually want is managed Postgres without the backend-as-a-service wrapper, Aiven and Clever Cloud are both stronger and more mature. PocketBase is the option worth knowing about for smaller projects: a single binary with database, auth, realtime and file storage, which you can run anywhere.

Yes, and with these providers it is the default rather than a configuration option you have to remember. Clever Cloud and Scaleway operate only European regions; Exoscale offers Swiss and EU zones; Aiven lets you pin a service to a specific European region across several underlying clouds.

This is the substantive reason to prefer a European provider over an EU region of an American one. A US-parented company can be compelled to produce data it controls regardless of where the servers sit. A European provider with no US corporate presence is not subject to the same instrument — which is why Scaleway, Clever Cloud and Exoscale market on jurisdiction rather than just latency.

For many teams, yes. PocketBase runs as a single binary and is genuinely production-viable for small to medium applications. Elestio takes the middle path: it manages open-source services for you but deploys them into your own cloud account, so you keep ownership of the infrastructure.