[brundolf]

My website is hosted on the cheapest non-free Heroku tier ($7), and served by a single Node process. I've had a couple of posts get to #1 on HN (one stayed there for 24+ hours if I remember correctly), with zero server issues.

I do statically-render everything, so not doing that is the only reason I can think of for why so many sites might be going down when they get up on the front page. Many of these are blogs so could probably do much better, though I did see someone mention that this one uses websockets for something, so it would definitely be doing some logic on the server-side and wouldn't be able to go fully static.

[woudsma]

You should look into Dokku!

I'm hosting 30+ apps (frontends / api's / cms's / other processes) on a single 5eu/mo DigitalOcean droplet. I believe Hertzner is the cheapest hosting provider with a 2,87eu/mo VPS.

Self-hosting is a lot of fun, and cheaper. Dokku has been around for several years, it's an open-source Heroku clone and I would recommend it to anyone looking into deploying web apps.

[brundolf]

I've heard of it; for me, messing with a system (even once) isn't really fun, it just gets in the way of spending time on my code. I don't have a ton of projects and Heroku has a free tier for things that don't need 100% uptime, so it's worth the extra couple bucks for me

Edit: I see DigitalOcean has it available as a 1-click install. Do you get totally automatic updates/system management and everything with that?

[ornornor]

How do you keep things secure and up to date? That’s always been my problem and when developing an app I don’t want to do system administration so I always end up going with heroku (or it’s cheaper sibling render.com lately) because I don’t have time for system administration, backing up, etc.