One problem of VPS solutions is that they're easy to maintain until you have to do it. At some point the technical debt comes back and you need to upgrade the stack components and eventually the OS as well, without sacrificing uptime.
... if you did things well, it's just starting another instance and installing / copying things over with some minimum downtime. But if you don't have a 100% documented stack, you don't know which configurations you touched to make things work, you have files lying around, then you're probably going to pay back all your savings and more in the workdays needed to migrate.
At my current employer we never have time for maintenance, and we don't have professional expertise (the "I worked exclusively at this for many years" kind, I mean) at webhosting, security, system admin or dba, so I heavily lean towards more "managed" and cloud solutions.
I completely agree (it's always the small changes that make things work that cause problems), but for this product which is greenfield and has a very small team, it seems like a good fit.
Like, I wouldn't run Shopify like this, or anything really large, but it may get them to a better place right now.
What I really liked about this post was the discussion of what they actually needed and how to achieve their goals. It's a tradeoff of time against money, and I wish more people documented their thought processes and approaches to this kind of stuff.
... if you did things well, it's just starting another instance and installing / copying things over with some minimum downtime. But if you don't have a 100% documented stack, you don't know which configurations you touched to make things work, you have files lying around, then you're probably going to pay back all your savings and more in the workdays needed to migrate.
At my current employer we never have time for maintenance, and we don't have professional expertise (the "I worked exclusively at this for many years" kind, I mean) at webhosting, security, system admin or dba, so I heavily lean towards more "managed" and cloud solutions.