[hotpotamus]

I would say all the major cloud providers are full of foot guns that can end up charging you frightening amounts of money. I'm undecided if it's actually intended or just a side effect of their complexity, but either way it's not something they're trying to fix. There are tons of other models out there besides them though - traditionally small VPS providers are what you are looking for - from no names to something in between like Linode or Digital Ocean. AWS emulated that model with Lightsail as well.

But if you want my actual protip, then check out Oracle's cloud product. I'd mostly steer you away from Oracle, but in this case their cloud has a good always free tier and will not allow you to overrun the free boundaries. It's also basically an AWS clone so what you learn will have some carryover as well.