Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

Single server is very cheap for hobbyist.

Just something to consider if you are in a professional environment before switching your entire infra: maintenance cost is expensive. I strongly suggest to throw man-days in your cost calculation.

To prevent security vulnerabilities, the team will need to write some playbooks to auto-update regularly your machine, hoping for no breaking changes. Or instead write a pipeline for immutable OS images updates. And it often mean testing on an additional canary VM first.

Scaling up the VM from a compute point of view is not that straightforward as well, and will require depending of the provider either downtime or to migrate the entire deployments to a new instance.

Scaling from a disk size point of view, you will need to play with filesystems.

And depending on the setup you are using, you might have to manage lets encrypt, authentication and authorization, secrets vaults, etc (here at least Disco manages the SSL certs for you)

If you are large enough, you will need an ops team to manage allowing your developers to write terraform and manage AWS costs already.

If you are small enough, you are not going to be truly affected by downtime. If you are just a little bigger, a single hot spare is going to be sufficient.

The place where you get dinged is heavy growth in personnel and bandwidth. You end up needing to solve CPU bound activities quicker because it hurts the whole system. You need to start thinking about sticky round robin load balancing and other fun pieces.

This is where the cloud can allow you to trade money for velocity. Eventually, though, you will need to pay up.

That said, the average SaaS can go a long way with a single server per product.

> I strongly suggest to throw man-days in your cost calculation.

Only if those man-days actually incur a marginal cost. If it's just employees you already have spending their time on things, then it's not worth factoring in because it's a cost you pay regardless.

That's the case if said employees have nothing better to do and are currently twiddling their thumbs. Usually the server maintenance hours come out of project development hours.

It's precisely why we moved from a self-hosted demo environment server to heroku - the developers that had both the skills to manage a server and enough seniority to have access accross all the different projects could bring in more by building.

If they are spending their time fiddling around disk resizing and package upgrades, it's time they are not spending helping deliver real business features.

This part can be outsourced to a PaaS company, so that the company engineers can be focused on what is the company actually making money from.