[cooljacob204]

I used a digital ocean ubuntu droplet with haproxy and certbot back when I first started off. Used their Postgres service for the database and only opened port 443 and 80 to public traffic. Droplet backups for backups if the vm needed and deployments were a manual git pull.

Sure a little complicated but there are plenty of good tutorials out there.

I would say Heroku for a new dev is not actually ideal. It hides way too much of the inner workings and makes it harder to learn about web development. I think it's more appropriate for a startup which just wants a ci/cd pipeline and some redundancy without investing that much time into it.

[danjac]

Digital Ocean's Postgres service launched in 2019.

I mean sure, you can learn all the other bits and pieces and I have no doubt learning them is valuable, but for a novice who just wanted to get something out there - beyond a static website - Heroku was hard to beat. Sure, it got expensive fast, and that's when you should learn how to manage hosting on your own. But at that point you had more of an idea what you needed and why.