What is cloud deployment?

What you are really choosing is how much of the machine remains your problem. At one end you rent a virtual server and own the operating system, the web server, the certificates and the updates. At the other, a managed platform takes your repository and handles the build, the runtime and the scaling, and you never see a server. Most projects I deploy sit at the managed end, with the database as a separate managed service.

The trade is control and cost predictability against operational load. Managed platforms bill by usage, so a traffic spike or a chatty background job can produce a bill nobody forecast, and the further up the abstraction you go the more your architecture assumes that specific provider. Worth checking early: whether anything in your product needs a long-running process, because that is the one shape managed platforms handle worst.