field notes
Everything I ship runs on one cheap server. Here's the whole stack.
verdict
You do not need Kubernetes, a PaaS bill, or a microservice in sight to run real products. One small VPS, a reverse proxy, systemd, and a nightly backup covers a solo dev's entire portfolio until well past the point where it's paying for itself.
There's a quiet industry devoted to convincing solo developers they need infrastructure built for companies with an ops team. Meanwhile my apps, cron jobs, databases, and this site all live on a single server that costs less than a sandwich.
The stack, top to bottom
| Layer | What I use | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Server | One small VPS (see picks under $10) | ~$5/mo |
| Reverse proxy + TLS | Caddy — certificates renew themselves | $0 |
| App runtime | systemd services, deployed by rsync + restart | $0 |
| Database | SQLite or a single Postgres | $0 |
| Email list | Systeme.io free plan | $0 |
| Backups | Nightly cron → offsite object storage | pennies |
The rules that make it work
Boring technology only — every component here has a decade of Stack Overflow answers behind it. One server, many apps, isolated by systemd units. Everything reproducible from a setup script, so the server itself is disposable. And a backup you've actually test-restored, because an untested backup is a hope, not a backup.
If managing the box yourself sounds miserable rather than fun, that's what managed hosting like Cloudways is for — same result, someone else on call.
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