I thought (though apparently with these comments I'm in the minority) the most recent conventional wisdom has reverted to agreeing that yes, starting on self-hosted / managed servers is the best path. Seems like naysayers in here don't know how to set up a server with NGINX / SSL / whatever else you need. IMO these are _required_ experiences before trying to do it on a much more complex platform like AWS. These self managed server setup tasks are more than manageable for a small team, or even a solo dev, in a matter of a day or two.

My go to 'cloud' path is just a digital ocean droplet, using docker containers to spool up whatever you need and connect it all on a docker network.

A single server (2-4 cores) running quite literally ANY modern backend framework (node, go, C#) should be able to handle _thousands_ of requests per second, I'm not sure where or when this idea has disappeared, it seems like everyone automatically assumes their small SaaS or webshop needs an autoscaling kubernetes 20 rack workhorse of a server. Not the case at all!!!!

Scale when you need to - if you're getting the kind of traffic where you need to, by then you won't need to worry about the added cost to do the actual scaling / upgrading.

Sorry for the winded / ranty answer, I've done this like 20+ times at this point and always had to battle against the "let's put it on AWS with kubectl and 2349023 redundant instances!", when in the long run it was never needed...