AWS is nice. You have a lot of control over your infrastructure and you can control it easily with APIs. The one thing to be careful of with AWS is that they ha

AWS is nice. You have a lot of control over your infrastructure and you can control it easily with APIs. The one thing to be careful of with AWS is that they have a lot of nice services that can be tempting to use but will lock you into their system. Don't make your application dependent on services like their messaging queue or NoSQL db, build something that can run in any data center easily. If you do that, it doesn't really matter where you're hosting. It's easy to move from cloud to cloud, so there's also no need to unnecessarily invest yourself in AWS (which is complicated) from the beginning when a $5 VPS on Digital Ocean might have better performance and be cheaper anyway. When you're just getting started, do what's easy and focus on your product. For something simple, AWS, RackSpace and Digital Ocean are all good options that won't make you sorry. Anecdotally, we started at Rackspace and have started moving to AWS for their APIs / powerful feature set. We have servers both places and they're mostly the same, each with their own strengths.