Unless you’re just dropping a .php file in a shared server account, you have more setup and upgrade work setting up a running service. The first time it fails and you have to manually rebuild it, you’ll learn a valuable lesson about the PaaS value-add, too.

I find that dokku is a REALLY good middle ground... can even grow to have 2-3 servers, with a hosted load balancer and DBaaS, just deploying 3X exactly the same if you need redundancy. And starting off with a single server to experiment and host multiple apps is pretty easy to get started with (comparable to Heroku and similar).