I&#x27;m a former Linode employee, so you don&#x27;t have to sell me on the advantages of the VPS. :) I think we need to remember that people new to programming don&#x27;t know about all of the available tools and services. Costs could have been reduced by using a VPS, but they also could have been reduced without becoming a *nix expert. For instance, the author talked about buying SSL certificates, something that comes free with a CloudFlare account. They could have also used a CDN to reduce the load on their dynos.