Big fan of using DigitalOcean droplets instead of AWS for hosting simple backend APIs. A few perks:

- Fixed pricing, very predictable billing

- No CPU throttling vs. EC2 instances

- Bandwidth included in the cost of the droplet

I've built a few projects with Netlify hosting a React frontend and DigitalOcean running an API server for the backend/database. A single DO droplet can scale far beyond what I've used it for, especially when combined with a SPA that offloads much of the processing to the users' browser.