A light weight site run on a traditional web host is fine for most use cases early on in my opinion. The problem is so many people think of costly cloud hosting

A light weight site run on a traditional web host is fine for most use cases early on in my opinion. The problem is so many people think of costly cloud hosting as the first move and burn up all their capital even before they reach 10k users. That is why the dot com era was more fruitful. People started in their basement, and service outages were not a big deal... Heck, service outages were often the thing that spurred more interest in products and also spurred users to invest so that products could scale.