How much can you get out of a $4 VPS?
I know it&#x27;s not in fashion, but I will suggest that renting physical servers is a very good and under-appreciated compromise. As an example, 45€&#x2F;month gets you a 6-core AMD with 64GB of RAM and NVMe SSDs at Hetzner. That&#x27;s a lot of computing power!<p>Virtualized offerings perform significantly worse (see my 2019 experiments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jan.rychter.com&#x2F;enblog&#x2F;cloud-server-cpu-performance-comparison-2019-12-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jan.rychter.com&#x2F;enblog&#x2F;cloud-server-cpu-performance-...</a>) and cost more. The difference is that you can &quot;scale on demand&quot;, which I found not to be necessary, at least in my case. And if I do need to scale, I can still do that, it&#x27;s just that getting new servers takes hours instead of seconds. Well, I don&#x27;t need to scale in seconds.<p>In my case, my entire monthly bill for the full production environment and a duplicate staging&#x2F;standby environment is constant, simple, predictable, very low compared to what I&#x27;d need to pay AWS, and I still have a lot of performance headroom to grow.<p>One thing worth noting is that I treat physical servers just like virtual ones: everything is managed through ansible and I can recreate everything from scratch. In fact, I do use another &quot;devcloud&quot; environment at Digital Ocean, and that one is spun up using terraform, before being passed on to ansible that does the rest of the setup.