I'm 99% sure I'm reading something wrong, as that's incredible expensive unless this is hosting LLM models or something similar, but it seems like it's a website for sharing expenses?
A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.
I unfortunately sorta put myself in this category where my PaaS of choice is Firebase. For this cost-splitting app however, what would you personally recommend if not Vercel? Would you recommend something like a Digital Ocean Droplet or something else? What are the best alternatives in your opinion?
You'd have a Linux machine (the VPS) that would have at least 3 programs running (or it is running Docker, with these programs running inside containers):
- Node.js
- the database (likely MySQL or PostgreSQL)
- Nginx or Apache
You'd set up a DNS record pointing your domain at the VPS's IP address. When someone visits your website, their HTTP requests will be routed to port 80 or 443 on the VPS. Nginx will be listening on those ports, and forward (aka proxy) the requests to Node, which will respond back to Nginx, which will then send the response back to the user.
There are of course security and availability concerns that are now your responsibility to handle and configure correctly in order to reach the same level of security and availability provided by a good PaaS. That's what you're paying the PaaS for. However, it is not too difficult to reach a level of security and availability that is more than sufficient for a small, free web app such as this one.
I’ve commented here before that on AWS (which I’m fairly familiar with) I could set up ECS with a load balancer and have a simple web app with rds running in about 30 minutes, and literally never have to touch the infra again.