[govolckurself]

Why is "learn more about how to properly host something" never an option for people? And in 2018! Suck it up and learn how to secure a VM, folks, especially if you're turning tutorials into production services. Most of those issues don't just go away when someone builds yet another expensive abstraction on top of a server, I promise.

[alx__]

As someone who took this advice around 2016 and setup servers for clients' sites I was building, the lesson I would impart here is: DON'T DO THIS

Maybe do this for small side projects and people who don't care if the site goes down.

Nothing more fun than trying to figure out what your 2016 self did to set up that fucking server based on a half-baked tutorial that was the top Google hit. And now it's crashing, and you don't know what the fuck is wrong. And the client is frantically texting you asking when the site will be up again.

The curse of knowledge gets people to forget how fucking steep the learning curve can be when every Linux thing is new. Especially when you're trying to debug a problem and every StackOverflow answer has you chasing wrong paths.

2023 me would have no problem doing this now, but also why the fuck would I want to waste my time mucking about fixing dumb problems. There's no need to prove how awesome I am at doing DevOps. I'm 100% ok paying a premium to let that be someone else's problem. I would rather solve fun problems than doing endless maintenance tasks.

[govolckurself]

>I would rather solve fun problems than doing endless maintenance tasks.

Not everything in your career will be fun and exciting, and what you consider to be maintenance that you can ignore, some of us consider fundamentals that one ought to know to be considered a serious professional. Food for thought.

Edit: the real lesson is to avoid doing mission-critical, production work for customers without the requisite knowledge. This is hard to hear, but if people don't, they'll overestimate their abilities and get into trouble. It's fine to be junior, it's not fine to oversell your skills.

[danjac]

Again, standing in the shoes of a beginner, you don't know what you don't know.

Heroku offered a path to easy, relatively secure deployment of a database-driven web application. If your aim is to just get something up and running - an MVP - it was probably fine, until it got too expensive. Maybe then you could buckle down and learn the "right" way, or maybe your business took off and you could just keep paying Heroku. If you're running a one-person SAAS, you might not have the time to spend on learning devops, when you have to fix bugs and add features and deal with customer support and sales. Sure, you'll hit that pain point when Heroku no longer works for you, but as detailed in the original post, that pain point may be years off.