[jenkstom]

Companies like Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, Scaleway cater to small developers. The costs are much lower, although the flexibility and features aren't the same as AWS. If you need the features of AWS then definitely take a look at their main competitors too (Google and Microsoft), they all have slightly different feature sets and optimizations.

Personally I've never found a reason to use AWS/Azure/GCS for small projects, they're just too costly.