I don't remember having to deal with VMs directly at work, but for deployment I do remember the process of setting up a shared instance hosted by a third-party

I don't remember having to deal with VMs directly at work, but for deployment I do remember the process of setting up a shared instance hosted by a third-party company (usually LAMP stack), SFTP-ing you files from your localhost computer to the nameservers provided by the third party, and then managing upkeep of databases and cron jobs if any. I'm trying to find a "Rosetta stone" to go from shared web hosting (BlueHost, HostGator, etc.) to AWS based hosting. For example, with storing files, how to translate the storage of files in a Linux-Apache instance to S3 infrastructure.