When I first started dabbling into trying to do something on my own, Google App Engine (GAE) seemed the easiest to understand and get off the ground. And the fact that everything 'just worked' and didn't require setting up stuff was awesome in my opinion. GAE Launcher was the cherry on the cake which is why it was such a bummer when they deprecated it (and this led to my current side project -
https://nocommandline.com - which is a replacement for GAE Launcher).
I was initially worried GAE wouldn't survive but finding out that Khan Academy is hosted on GAE [1] gave me confidence of its longevity.
I once tried looking at AWS and it took me awhile to figure out they had a PaaS and trying to set it up essentially gave me a headache (keep in mind that I'm not a 9-5 programmer).
1. https://cloud.google.com/customers/khan-academy