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@MethoD said:
Oh hey, I can contribute to this discussion.

You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you.

Oh hey, I can contribute to this discussion.

Digital Ocean is a clear winner to me. The costs are far clearer (and, for the most part, lower) than AWS, the setup 250 times easier, and the tooling is super simple. I run a few servers through them. First: separate your DB from the the application server. Take your DB private so that only your application server can talk to it. Then set your application up on a droplet. Should be super simple.

Then set both your DB and your app server to backups and take frequent snapshots. If something fails, you can literally just click "create server from backup/snapshot" and you're back online with minimal (if any) data loss.

If you need load balancers, you can setup your app server on the smallest server behind a load balancer (DO has one-click LB setups for $20/mo if you don't want to deal with it), setup rules to scale when needed, and connect your smaller app nodes to the same shared block storage to store any image uploads and things you have.

Honestly, without DO, every shop would need a full devops team to constantly manage this kind of stuff on AWS. AWS is more powerful, but for 99.99% of use cases, you don't need the majority of its features.

BONUS: DO also has a slew of EXCELLENT devops tutorials: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials -- they apply even if you're not on their platform, FYI.

Feel free to email me if you have Q's or want to check out my setup.