"Which cloud provider should we use?" is really three separate questions in disguise: how much operational work do you want to do yourself, how predictable is your traffic, and how specialized is your infrastructure need. AWS, Vercel, and DigitalOcean answer those questions very differently.
AWS: maximum control, maximum complexity
Amazon Web Services offers essentially every infrastructure primitive that exists — compute, storage, databases, queues, machine learning services, and hundreds of others — with fine-grained control over each. That power comes with a real cost: a non-trivial learning curve, a pricing model with enough dimensions to genuinely surprise you, and enough configuration surface area to misconfigure something important without realizing it. AWS makes the most sense when you have specific infrastructure requirements (compliance, unusual scale, integration with other AWS services) or a team with the expertise to run it well.
Vercel: built for modern frontend frameworks
Vercel (the company behind Next.js) is optimized specifically for deploying frontend and full-stack JavaScript applications. Push to a Git branch, get a live preview URL automatically, and production deploys happen with essentially no server configuration. The trade-off is less flexibility outside that lane — it's excellent for Next.js and similar frameworks, less suited to, say, a long-running background job system or a non-JS backend.
DigitalOcean: the middle ground
DigitalOcean offers straightforward virtual machines ("Droplets"), managed databases, and simplified container platforms, with clear, predictable pricing and far less surface area to get lost in than AWS. It's a strong choice for teams that want real server control without AWS's complexity overhead, or that are running something outside the JS-framework-focused sweet spot Vercel targets.
How we actually decide
- Next.js marketing sites and web apps — Vercel, almost by default. The deployment experience is simply better for this specific case.
- Custom backends, background workers, or non-standard architectures — DigitalOcean, for predictable cost and enough control without unnecessary complexity.
- Enterprise-scale, compliance-heavy, or AWS-service-dependent projects — AWS, because at that point its breadth is the point.
The "best" cloud provider is the one that matches your actual operational capacity today, not the one with the most features on paper.
A word on switching later
Starting simple doesn't lock you in forever. A well-structured application (clean separation between app code, database, and file storage) can migrate between these providers later if your needs genuinely outgrow your starting choice — which is a far more common and manageable situation than choosing the "wrong" one on day one.