Answer Details

Here’s a practical short-list I recommend for SaaS startups, grouped by what you need and why they’re good. Hyperscalers (most flexibility, widest services) AWS — safest default if you want every managed service under the sun, great VPC/IAM maturity, tons of docs/integrations. Steeper learning curve and cost controls. GCP — standout for data/analytics (BigQuery, Pub/Sub) and clean developer UX. Excellent if your product is data-heavy or ML-adjacent. Azure — best when you’re a Microsoft/.NET shop or selling to enterprises already on Azure; strong compliance story. Modern app platforms (ship faster, fewer knobs) Vercel — frictionless for JS/TS (Next.js), serverless + edge, previews for every PR. Great for marketing sites and SaaS dashboards with API backends. Render / Railway / Fly.io — simple deploys for web services, workers, queues, Cron. Ideal for MVP to early scale without managing Kubernetes. Heroku — still the benchmark for simplicity; great DX, rich add-on marketplace. Pricier at scale. Cost-efficient VPS clouds (you manage more, save more) Hetzner (EU-friendly) / DigitalOcean / Linode — straightforward compute, good pricing. Pair with Docker/Dokku/Nixpacks; you own ops tradeoffs. Serverless/edge-first (global latency, bursty workloads) Cloudflare (Workers/Durable Objects/R2/D1) — globally distributed, ultra-low-latency APIs, excellent for rate-sensitive or globally-used features. AWS Lambda + API Gateway — mature serverless with deep ecosystem; great for event-driven backends. Managed databases you’ll likely pair with the above Postgres: Neon, Supabase, Aiven, RDS — Neon/Supabase are fast to start; RDS when you need enterprise knobs. MySQL: PlanetScale (branching, non-blocking schema changes). MongoDB Atlas if document store fits better. Quick picks by situation “I need to launch in days, iterate weekly.” Vercel (frontend + serverless) + PlanetScale/Neon + Render/Railway for background jobs/queues. “I want the most future-proof/enterprise-friendly.” AWS (ECS/Fargate or EKS) + RDS + CloudFront + S3; add Redis (Elasticache) and OpenSearch as needed. “We’re data/analytics-heavy.” GCP (GKE/Cloud Run) + Cloud SQL + BigQuery + Pub/Sub. “.NET or Microsoft stack.” Azure App Service/AKS + Azure SQL + Azure AD/B2C. “Keep costs lean; we’re comfortable with ops.” Hetzner/DigitalOcean + Docker + managed Postgres (Aiven/Neon). What to optimise for (rules of thumb) Speed now, migrations later: pick a platform that gets you users fastest; migrations are a good problem to earn. Use managed services by default: DBs, queues, caching—rent reliability early. Keep infra boring: Postgres + Redis + object storage carries far. Observability day-one: logs + metrics + error tracking (e.g., OpenTelemetry + a hosted vendor). Cost guardrails: set budgets/alerts and per-service limits; use smaller instances + autoscaling before big boxes. If you share your stack (language, DB preference, team size, target customers, budget), I can map this to a concrete reference architecture and starter checklist.