Hosting on AWS

Digital Ocean has $5/mo droplets. Despite the price, they're quite powerful to run a small-to-medium site, especially if you know how to do linux administration.

Also, AWS recently launched an Amazon Activate program https://aws.amazon.com/startups/ for startups without venture fundings. You can get credits to run your stuff on AWS. It seems all their services available in this program.

From someone with the GCP & AWS certs, I tend to stick to Digital Ocean myself. You should use DO to get familiar with how the cloud works, particularly the IAM, DNS, VPC, and Load Balancer. If you find you are scaling to 50k concurrent connections, you architected your software stack using cloud native versions of these components, scaled well with this MVP of a small 50k concurrent connections on DO and you are comfortable with all of this - only then do I suggest you replatform this MVP-scale onto something like AWS or GCP for a Production-scale solution that will last the test of time and true infinite scale. The big cloud service providers (CSP) are hard, really big learning curve, but they are actually a massive margin cheaper than smaller CSP like DO but you have to use the right tool for the job and often that requires these learning curves.
AWS gives you more and cheaper options, like lego, so requires the most skill but gives you so much more power and scale than anything else. GCP is easier to get started, costs more faster, and much harder to reduce costs due to lacking as many options that can do the job better/cheaper. Mostly GCP has more secure defaults unless you take the Kubernetes path which is purposefully insecure by default to help get started using it faster (though all of GCP is far less tested than AWS so who even knows if it is really a better choice in any category). I like GCP for toy projects, AWS for real production scale, and DO for SMBs. GCP it is easy but if I use the banking customers as an example, it needs a team 20x larger than an AWS team with similar banks of customer size and technology offerings, so taking a toy project to production in GCP is not something I want to do with a small team. DO is small but an excellent production for SMBs like us, but don't rule out AWS as it is an amazing option if you can find a rare experienced person that has experience building AWS for real production scale traffic, and not just toy projects to get a cert.

Good luck.

I've done deep dive risk assessments per service for both CSPs, more than that I have written code for 50+ businesses now so have used nearly all of the services now. But even doing this work since the year 2000 I still am learning how best to use the cloud.. It is never ending.

I would need more context to answer this properly.

But for a MVP, you can't go wrong with Amazon Lightsail or AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Linode and Digitalocean is more reasonable priced as you get a lot of traffic. I personally have accounts with them for more than $500 / month. I'm very satisfied.

I still have things with AWS - mostly some S3 accounts, but when I used their EC and Lightsail - the bills just seems to be too extreame, so we have slowly migrated away from them.

If you are talking my personal/private projects, I just use a couple of $5 nodes from Linode. One for DB and one for web on a 1gbit internal network. Super professional set up for $10 a month and it can still take a shitload of traffic if it's just a light application.

You can get free AWS hosting for 1-3 years, I would go look around for credits :)

just get the cheapest that you can get.

you can always scale later... which would be a great problem to have.

save money. save money. save money... and then, save money.

... doesn't bluehost have something like... $4.99USD/mo?

this is STUPID OLD post, but, i'll share it anyways.