Depends on what you're doing. I've been pretty find of Digital Ocean, but there's lots of smaller or in between options.

If I'm targeting AWS, Azure, etc. Then I'm going to leverage their services in a lot of cases. Wether it's AWS Dynamo DB, or hosted PostgreSQL, there are places you will save in either resources or personnel.

A set of Dokku servers behind a load balancer can go a long way. Kubernetes further still. Taking the issue of DB management, static assets or backups goes a long way to freeing up time to make solutions without buying into lockin too much.

Good question. It seems there is far more to learn for each different cloud provider than buy a vps and i. e. just learn how to install postgresql on Linux and run your application.