Yeah I get that, it does take a bit of work and time to learn and get used or comfortable with this stuff which a lot of the times could be better spent building or promoting your app and then just hire someone in the future to deal with that if needed.
Being used to configure my own servers with relatively low traffic/processing needs on the cheap, I just get weirded out sometimes by the very expensive nature of these managed services like heroku, aws, etc and their "charge for every little thing" mentality.
Still, the "elastic" functionalities and auto growth features they offer are usually pretty awesome and not trivial to setup on a VPS so it's a great and worry free option in that regard.
Hope you can find the right solution for your case, good luck :)
I wish I could manage a VPS. I've dabbled with DO et al but I wouldn't sleep at night having a self configured VPS in production.