[damm]

You should just start with a managed setup; a VPS could work but AWS gives you an overhead to manage and be aware of.

While your building up; you may switch to AWS once you need more scaling ability. But if you pick some hosting provider like Internap you can get hardware pretty fast and will be cheaper in the longrun than any public cloud.

Sad; classic hosting is now trying beat the public cloud. The public cloud is trying to get everyone on it and kill classic hosting.

It will never die however; because even Amazon needs a datacenter.