imo, really depends on what you're doing, what your team's skills are, growth trajectory, money, etc. if you need to scale a ton of compute up and down, k8s might be a good fit, but for most startups, it's using a sledgehammer to drive a finishing nail.

* how much downtime can be tolerated during a deploy or outage? load balancing and multi-region is more $$$.

* if you have a bunch of linux nerds and an efficient app -- a nginx webserver + your app + Postgres DB and Ansible to manage a single VM with Cloudflare in front of it might be a good option. Portainer in the VM is nice if you want to go with containers.

* if you have a bunch of desktop devs, containers and build pipelines with PaaS are a good option. many are resilient and have HTTPs built in.

* the smaller your infra/devops team, the more i would leverage team knowhow and encourage PaaS offerings.

* the smaller your budget, the more creative you need to be (ec2/storage accounts as part of hosting, singular monolithic VM has relatively flat costs, what free stuff do i have on my cloud provider, etc)