Just be careful with AWS, you need a PhD in it to even approximate what hosting will cost you. The company I currently work for is all-in on Azure, which has been working out great so far. It’s also much easier to see your monthly cost on there with budget alerts and so on.
Either way, DevOps is extremely expensive. For the money you pay for a single VM in the “cloud” you could get a really nice virtual server from your favorite hosting provider. But if you just want to learn for now, stick with the free offerings (and be very careful with them! Plenty of stories of someone getting a $1000 or even $15000 bill because they messed up along the line).