DigitalOcean App Platform

Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app.

Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which makes it a dead end for anything non trivial. You're forced to go to digital ocean / Linode / OVH instead to have something affordable.

That leaves Digital Ocean as the only alternative (don't trust Linode) and it sucks because it only gives me a server to manage. I don't want to manage a server I want to run a (python) application. It's 2020 this sort of things should auto deploy from GitHub without bothering me to manage an operating system.

My project currently runs on Digitalocean managed k8s and setting it up really wasn't hard. I had everything already in containers for dev/prod anyway, and having those run on k8s just meant I had to write the deployment manifests that pull the containers and setup the pods.

What I love about managed k8s (and also shared a couple times in comments on HN) is that it's separated from the servers below. I can have 20 containers (that can be separate things all-together) running on the cheapest Droplet and would only pay whatever that droplet costs, so under $20. Then when I need more power, I just scale the Droplets used for the k8s cluster and my pods/containers get shoveled around the available resources automatically.

I liked this approach so much that I now have a private 'personal projects cluster' that runs on digitalocean with the cheapest/weakest droplet avvailable, and whenver I have a small hobby project that needs to be hosted somewhere, I just add that container to the k8s cluster and be done with it.