[cornholio]

I don't even bother setting up VPS instances by hand. If you have gmail then you have access to Google Cloud, and they offer a free tier of Cloud Run that comfortably covers anything you might do on a personal project.

You basically create a github, put a dockerfile inside it with your nginx config, frontend files, backend etc., then push and the Cloud Run instance is built for you then deployed into production. By default you are paying only for active requests, when a http request hits your box GCP will wake it up, charge for the CPU time used for serving it, then leave it idle for free for about 15 minutes. If another hit comes in that interval, you have instantaneous response because the instance is warm, otherwise it will wake up again and see a few seconds of latency (ie. during the night, when you have few visitors etc).

It also scales up automatically if you have substantial traffic, you don't have to do anything other than design your application so that multiple instances hitting the same data storage (ex. Firestore) will play nice. It of course handles all security, versioning, HTTPS certs etc. for you, you are simply serving plain HTTP traffic within the GCP internal network and just make sure your own application (what you push to git) is secure.

The things you pay for are outbound traffic (for obvious reasons like warez etc.) as well as storage of docker images (Artifact registry, i think you only have 0.5GB free, about 3 alpine images), but you can easily set up a rule to auto-delete old images.

Overall, you can run a small business with daily/weekly updates for less than a dollar a month and hit 5 nines availability, which you will never achieve for a self-administered VPS. Sorry if it sounds like an advertisement, but it's just enormous value for a small builder.

[xandrius]

I still think you described using a VPS but with a tons of extra steps, expenses and then being tied to an evil corporation people are trying to move past.

You get a generic VPS and you can do whatever the hell you like, not paying bigG for some "obvious reasons" like outbound traffic.

And a small business will never need 5 nines availability, that's just the propaganda from big tech to over engineer and pay them for that. You can run a small/medium business and be offline for 1 hour every day (makes it 95.8%) and still be fine. It's when you're worldwide and not that small that you want better availability.

Also, you know all those AWS outages? My VPSs were never impacted to the slightest!

[cornholio]

A docker image host is NOT a VPS with extra steps, because a VPS is a server and needs to be administered professionally as a server by someone competent for that job, that excludes 90% of developers who are willing to spend only one hour per year for this task. Think about running mail servers, you can do it manually but to do a good job you need to invest so much time and effort that almost everyone doing it will throw in the towel eventually.

And while I agree with the sentiment of resisting encloudification, you can take your docker image to any other host if you want, it's a generic service. in a pinch, you can build your own and have 100% control just like the VPS case.

The point is that you don't have to, you just git push into production and forget about it. that's a good few dozens less "extra steps" than the VPS route.