Sure it's not for everyone. I learnt a lot doing cash strapped startups where there wasn't a devops person. AWS can get expensive, especially when you start using more and more services (lambda,dynamodb,rds,elasticache etc) although it can be easily scaled.

Note, you probably shouldn't do it by hand (setting up your own servers). You'd use Ansible/Terraform.

For those that are interested but not quite ready, here's a great article [0].

[0] https://github.com/fpereiro/backendlore.