Right on! I am enjoying the book “A Company of One” right now and the author makes the same point of only doing what it takes to provide great service to a few customers. Another point is to spend more effort servicing existing customers than spending time trying to get new customers.

For deployment: if you can tolerate rare service downtimes then it is difficult to beat Linode or Digital Ocean. I am probably in a minority, but I also really like GCP’s AppEngine: turn on billing, set the minimum instance count to one and the maximum to two or three, and you have a resilient system. That said, I run my primary web site on a single tiny GCP VPS instance with no fault tolerance.

For heavier compute requirements, I also really like a physical server from Hetzner- for about $100/month you can get a GPU, i7, and lots of RAM and bandwidth.