[codegeek]

"a VPS is fine for a low risk pet project like your portfolio, a blog, some marketing websites, the project I built over the weekend"

You are making the same mistake the article did. VPS is a great option for lot of production applications and not just low risk or pet projects. Not every production application needs Elastic Beanstalk or Lambda.

The answer is always "It depends but all options are on the table"

[squallstar]

I agree, I deliberately generalised with those examples to make a little clear that as the required traffic, capacity and risk increases there's a lot of benefits with using services that automatically configure and provisions load balancers, network routers, machines, clusters, etc for you.

This is not to say that it's a "one click configuration+deploy with no security issues whatsoever" , but depending on the clients you work with you may be rightfully forced into using a cloud provider and hire DevOps engineer to manage the infrastructure.