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My main requirement is that I don't want any lock in; if something goes wrong, I want to be able to easily move providers and spin up my deployment there.
My contenders so far are Hetzner and Linode. What are you guys using and how has your experience been?
Feel free to check them out. If you want I can send you my referral link.
That said: I don't know enough about your situation, but ... what are you optimizing for?
AWS/GCP/Azure have each got a platform that provides a heap of functionality. Using that will save you time-to-delivery and engineer-hours. All the clouds have startup programs that will mean it's basically free until you get some traction.
If you're looking for investment, using AWS/etc means you instantly avoid all the questions about CapEx and risk that follow from self-hosting.
Don't underestimate the upside of not dealing with a bunch of cobbled-together service providers (hosting, billing, SMS for 2FA, email, monitoring, etc, etc). Having a single provider and a single bill simplifies your admin a lot.
And if you need to scale in a hurry, it's a whole lot easier if you've adopted a cloud platform.
Is avoiding lock-in really a big problem? In your software, you can either use a third-party abstraction, or build a shim layer that sits above the services you use that would allow you to migrate (even to self-hosting) if you had to. For the most common services, there's not even really a need for this: the AWS API is widely supported anyway. The devops/sysadm side is harder though.
Some of this won't apply if you're bootstrapping: it's more work, but vastly cheaper to do a lot of stuff yourself, and renting a half-cabinet colo and stuffing it with off-lease servers will cost you engineer-hours, but saves a heap of cash. Augmenting that with a PC at home for backup, and cheap VMs from Digital Ocean, Vultr, Hetzner, Linode, etc for scale might work out well. But it's hard to beat the free plans from the clouds.
You are going to burn through a lot of time and resources worrying about cloud lock in and being cloud agnostic.
That’s energy that should go into building your product and finding customers.
- Cloudflare [1] scales easily and has a lot of easy to use services like databases and storage buckets, JAM Stack front end pages, and CDN services for images and videos.
- Render [2] has been great for us to spin up Python services quickly. I haven't worked with a production load on Render, but I hear good things :)
To be reductionist ... I'd rather have to deal with vendor lock in a growing successful startup, then have cloud agnostic infrastructure and be out of runway.
Even then, I think people generally over-engineer this problem. I've worked at multiple unicorns who have been 'locked' in to AWS/GCP/Azure.
Think in terms of risk, and opportunity cost.
Locations, bandwidth, number of machines, orchestration capabilities, etc?
Avoiding lock in is 'easy'; avoid using specialized services and features that aren't universal. Avoid bundling services that need not be bundled. Your hosting provider should not also be your domain registrar, and maybe shouldn't be your DNS provider, nor your email provider. Big cloud has high outbound bandwidth rates, so avoid collecting a large amount of state that would need to be copied in a move. (Easier said than done)
Pick one and get going