[davedx]

I work fulltime on an ecommerce platform deployed in AWS and part time on a number of small side projects on a Digital Ocean droplet. Managing infra on AWS is a big, complex undertaking with lots to learn. With my droplet I need to know some bits of Linux sysadmin (how to update it, install fail2ban and other small things). Deploying is via a bash script that basically builds, tarballs, scp’s then restarts server.

Basically for small, simple applications, Linode or DO are great. They’re simple, the pricing is simple.

For more complex applications with lots of components, service buses, microservices etc, bigger cloud services offer you lots of features, but it gets difficult to operate if you’re just one guy (IME).