Do not underestimate the power of a single server to host you app. Sure it won't work in _all_ situations but omg you can get so much out of a single $30/month VPS .. we've been indoctrinated that everything needs to be on hyperclouds and mega scale. But that brings so much cost and complexity that most applciations don't need.

There's a gap in my knowledge so far, which I think is mirrored in this post: I have been piecing together my server by hand, and I _know_ I will regret this at some point, but I don't know how I want to solve this yet. I don't want to involve Docker in this setup. Perhaps I should go back to Saltstack or Ansible, or maybe there's something in Nix for me, or snap/flatpack maybe, I don't know. There's a good chance I'll just never solve it, but it seems like there's a gap there that's waiting for a great, simple, small solution (or it exists and I just don't know about it).

So after all these years (decades now) of learning and working in linux every, single, day, I still have a lot to learn! :D

I'm also running my business on a single server, works perfectly, except for one time when someone tried to find some content with hash IDs through bruteforce. No problem, a tiny VPS can handle one malicious user. Except the amount of errors logged by nginx filled up the disk.

> sudo ufw default deny incoming

Seriously, what does one do when accepting connections, given the onslaught of data-hungry bots out there?

I wouldn't want to deal with that in any upcoming planned servers and services.

I run 5-7 on one server, with DB, using CapRover on a $5/month Hetzner server. Serve probably around 5k users.