Anyone work at a small shop and DOESN'T prefer AWS? They're the leader in the hosting space, from my perspective you'd have to have good reason NOT to use them at this point. They have more in terms of services and robustness than any other cloud platform, and its easier to hire developers who know it. If you're managing your own servers in this day and age then you either have a very specific use case that requires it, or you're behind.
Although it is more complex than say heroku, there are so many features, and eventually you may want them. Also the pricing is very competitive , if developer time is expensive.
Need to send emails, there's SES. Want to dynamically put up new test environments? Once you've got your setup right, you can have it modify route 53 dns records and connect it to a load balances and your EC2 instances... the list goes on forever.
All the tooling around is great, support/faq/docs are great. You can scale upscale down fast, and testing new ideas with AWS services is painless even for the costing view.
I'm not too concern about general costing compared with DO or Heroku.
Another benefit is if AWS is down, "half" of the internet is down, so explaining this to a customer you can just tell - "AWS is down."
Have been a 2 person dev team for awhile. Run software on both AWS and GCP.<p>We almost always reach for AWS, and that comes down to one thing. SUPPORT!<p>AWS support has been quick at resolving our issues on numerous occasions. GCP, not so much.