It is increasingly, vanishingly hard to not use the big three cloud services. Mainly because any platform or tool you might use is _also_ hosted on these clouds.
I mean there's tons of technology stacks to choose from, but people get lazy and take the easy way out rather than learning to scale servers themselves.
Get on Linode. It's base on Linux instances. If you build on Linux you are "free" and not "owned"
A proper database.
:)
AWS won’t tell you about those things because they sell you security, so you remain a dumbass about those things indefinitely.
It's not that hard.
In my experience most developers just inherit the infrastructure and even the base project from someone else. They've never stood up a server or configure anything from scratch so they have no idea what they're doing.