I want to make a site similar to Google Photos, but I'm hung up on the best/cheapest way to host the image files.

I don't want to run into the situation where I need to conduct an expensive, complex migration from one hosting provider to another (E.g. DO to AWS)

I've considered hosting them on S3, but I'm not a huge fan of the complex AWS ecosystem (though maybe I should force myself to learn it in-depth)

I enjoy using DigitalOcean, but it seems to be more expensive.

My plan is to use some object storage offering, and save IDs in a database (because I've read that storing large files in the DB is "bad")

I have 0 experience in the large-file storage space – I've only ever worked with SQL databases. Can someone please share their experience?

Cheers!