What are my hosting needs?

Hi all,

I'm building a solution (Laravel) where I basically sell a subscription access to a content area.
I'm trying to figure out what will be my hosting needs, costs, and ultimately finding the sweet spot between usability and costs.

My options are:

1. Go with shred hosting.
2. Go with VPS (Digital Ocean/Vultr).
3. Go with AWS EC2.
4. Go with Heroku.

A little bit of perspective of my service needs/stats:

• low traffic (few hundreds to few thousands of people per day) mostly viewing content, with casual uploads of content (text+images).

My research yielded for each option:

1. Shared hosting is not bad. A lot of stuff is managed for you already out of the box for low costs. You get https cert., you get mailbox, easy setup of server/DB/cronjobs good support for PHP apps/Laravel. costs around 4.4$ a month for a standard plan. It's possible to connect github and push regularly and easily. I'm not sure if for my use case I should expect bad experience of using shared hosting.

2. VPS is also not bad. But a lot of the tasks that already taken care of in shared hosting are needed to be taken care by myself. Cost starts at 5$/Month, which I don't know if should increase for my use case.

3. AWS, I don't know much about it, but it has a free tier that should work seamlesly for a year and then I tried to simple calculate costs of using EC2, which turned out for a simple, equivalent to a basic 5$ droplet in DO, was 6.81$. But i'm not sure of the benefits my usecase will have comparing to the other options, especially to shared hosting.

4. Heroku sounds interesting but I don't understand the dynos so I can't say much. But I heard people say it gets expensive fast.

Would love to hear your take on this and some advices!