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Comment by ultramancool | Hacker News Reader

You can do the same for even less money and with any language - $5/mo digitalocean box and a quick hack ansible script to deploy. Maybe if you really don't understand the ops side of things you won't like even writing a little ansible script, but heck, I'd do it just to save $14/mo over this guy's scheme. I think understanding the ops side of things on your own small scale sites is quite useful sometimes though.

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Exactly, I think DigitalOcean is a great and unexpensive option here. The thing is, you really don't need a whole box for each of your small projects, most likely you will be able to have a few in one box, specially in the beginning with not much traffic.

So, start small and then move onto bigger things if things look promising. Use something like Dokku for easy deployment if Ansible or others are too much work. Every little bit will help when you do need to scale.

What about firewall config? What about installing SSL certs? What about subdomains? What about queue workers? Cron jobs?

The whole point of the article is that those items are completely beyond many devs. Yes, you could learn to do it yourself, but its just so much easier to get started with a service like Forge.

There are tons of runbooks in DigitalOcean's community, or Webfaction's or whatever else that guide you step by step on how to configure things.

It's a matter of choice, you can spend some extra money and have those things handled for you or you can save it and do it yourself (perhaps just once if you use some config management tool to save your settings).

P.S. It's also worth asking oneself, are these things really required for my small, personal projects? Perhaps they aren't and you can save yourself both time and money.

I don't know, maybe I'm not representative of most developers as I do devops for my side businesses, but I feel like I don't understand a technology well enough until I can handle both the development and the ops side and the ops side often feels like a prerequisite for properly handling the dev side.

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