None of the below is rocket science. These are simple heuristics that primarily stem from containing complexity.
- Prefer a Platform As A Service over Infrastructure As A Service.
- Being an AWS Expert is not something to gloat about if your software has less than 100,000 users.
- Always ensure your application server is in the same location as your database.
Our Current Go To Stack
- Domain & DNS Management: Cloudflare
- Hosting (Dev Server): A simple Hetzner server running Caddy using passenger as the app server. See The Live Development Environment
- Hosting (Production Server)
- Use Heroku for the application server. Try to avoid paid addons as that’s where the bill starts to get out of control. Instead of Heroku postgres, use Amazon RDS. Set up a small instance in the same region as the Heroku application, open a firewall rule to allow Heroku ip addresses, then add the url as the
DATABASE_URLenvironment variable.