[aobdev]

I think it depends on your goals. If this is a serious project and your first deployment, consider Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and a managed database (DBaaS). If it's a hobby project and you're interested in learning about infrastructure you could run your app, database, and reverse proxy on a single Linux VM, which any cloud will offer.

For PaaS, if you want a set-it and forget-it solution check out Render or DigitalOcean App Platform. If you want to dive a little bit deeper and learn about different offerings from the major cloud providers, compare the features of Google Cloud Run and App Engine, or AWS App Runner. All of these providers offer databases too.

Either way I recommend learning how to containerize your app because then you can run anything almost anywhere.

[dimmke]

>If this is a serious project and your first deployment, consider Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and a managed database (DBaaS). If it's a hobby project and you're interested in learning about infrastructure you could run your app, database, and reverse proxy on a single Linux VM, which any cloud will offer.

So, I'm currently dealing with this (like, today.) I containerized my web app. I started out with a $4 Droplet on DO. SSH'd into it, installed all the Docker stuff and cloned my repo. Could not even run npm ci with the resources available.

I kept having to resize the VM. First up to the $6 then I was running into different stuff. I ended up going up to the $24 / mo option just to get the image building. I didn't step up to every price point, because I just wanted to get the thing working, but I was really surprised at this. I don't think my Docker container is particularly resource intensive. I dialed it back to the $12 / mo option and will see how it goes.

But at least I have my whole app in a Dockerfile and the remaining infrastructure in a Docker Compose file. I like having that level of control.

Personally, my issue with PaaS is on top of being more expensive and potential vendor lock in, it often has its own little gotchas that end up not making it more convenient than the "hard way." I tried to use Digital Ocean's App Platform to build my image instead before and it was giving me Vite issues. It literally wouldn't compile even though it was compiling just fine locally and on the VM.

I think about other services like Cloudinary too. Compared to just using Sharp to do things like image transcoding. I just don't see the value there.

Overall, devops is not my area. I used to consider myself a front-end developer. But I'm glad I have been learning these skills. I don't think these "value added" services are worth the squeeze.

[_lvbh]

> Could not even run npm ci with the resources available. I kept having to resize the VM. First up to the $6 then I was running into different stuff. I ended up going up to the $24 / mo option just to get the image building.

This makes very little sense to me. I’ve been using $4 droplets to host a variety of projects (much of the time on the same server) and have rarely hit such issues.

How inefficient is the code for it to need the $24 droplet?

You probably shouldn’t be building the image on the droplet though, maybe build locally, release to docker registry, and only pull the image from the server.

[dimmke]

That's what I'm going to move to. It's part of the learning process for me. I want to set the image to build when I push to my repository.

I also think moving from npm to pnpm and leveraging caching will help. But the dockerfile itself is very very simple.