Use One Big Server (2022)

A thoroughly good article. It's probably worth also considering adding a CDN if you take this approach at scale. You get to use their WAF and DNS failover.

A big pain point that I personally don't love is that this non-cloud approach normally means running my own database. It's worth considering a provider who also provides cloud databases.

If you go for an 'active/passive' setup, consider saving even more money by using a cloud VM with auto scaling for the 'passive' part.

In terms of pricing the deals available these days on servers are amazing you can get 4GB RAM VPSs with decent CPU and bandwidth for ~$6 or bare metal for ~$90 for 32GB RAM quad core worth using sites like serversearcher.com to compare.

If you're running on a single machine then you'll get way more performance with something like sqlite (instead of postgres/MySQL) which also makes managing the database quite trivial.