[notgoodrobot]

What is a better route for someone wanting to run a personal project but also learn the tooling that would be needed if the project "took off" in the sense of using a lot of bandwidth or having a lot of users/data? If that question is too broad... Is lightsail a good starting place within AWS? Or is there another service that would allow for less lock in but similar features?

[mathgladiator]

Scale really does require some degree of dimensional analysis. You can go very far with just Amazon S3 and an EC2 host. The place to begin is really with the fundamentals of a single host, and then looking for where bottlenecks will happen per project. That's when you can go through the catalog and find something which may be an ok upgrade to then buy into the lock-in.