Agree that Heroku, while possibly more expensive, is the most straightforward to get going and maintain over time. You're paying them to figure out all the VM/c

Agree that Heroku, while possibly more expensive, is the most straightforward to get going and maintain over time. You're paying them to figure out all the VM/container/database/etc. stuff, and that's what you want. I've had several apps running pretty much untouched for years on Heroku (other than updating libraries and the Java runtime). Depending on the language, there may be other services that work just as well, but AWS/Google Cloud/Azure are either more expensive or will require more time to setup and maintain.