Setting up a VPS is pretty easy. Ensuring your VPS is configured to restart your app when the server restarts, maintaining OS and library updates, maintaining security, updating the app itself with simple-enough conventions, and configuring monitoring is not so necessarily easy. That’s not including documenting (even if only for your own future reference) how things are configured.
Digital Ocean in particular has great guides to get you from the starting line to something that in most cases will work okay, but as a long-term solution to “I have an app I want to run on some infrastructure”, I agree that there’s a non-zero cost to managing a server that, like you, I’d much rather not deal with.
Digital Ocean in particular has great guides to get you from the starting line to something that in most cases will work okay, but as a long-term solution to “I have an app I want to run on some infrastructure”, I agree that there’s a non-zero cost to managing a server that, like you, I’d much rather not deal with.