Yeah Hetzner is amazing and I think if you’re looking at a single app for costs in the $5 range, it’s probably not worth it to use k8s.
The magic with k8s is being able to easily host third party packages via helm. I often find for anything I want to run in production, I usually want something like sentry, grafana, etc, and those items can get expensive if you try to buy hosted versions. Kubernetes makes it trivial to just host it yourself.
In terms of performance, I’ve gotten reasonable performance out of a $24 kubernetes server, which is 2vCPU + 4GB memory. These days, DigitalOcean and linode don’t charge a markup on their managed kubernetes at all, above their regular VPS pricing.
Heztner is much cheaper than both those options though, and they don’t have a managed kubernetes product
The magic with k8s is being able to easily host third party packages via helm. I often find for anything I want to run in production, I usually want something like sentry, grafana, etc, and those items can get expensive if you try to buy hosted versions. Kubernetes makes it trivial to just host it yourself.
In terms of performance, I’ve gotten reasonable performance out of a $24 kubernetes server, which is 2vCPU + 4GB memory. These days, DigitalOcean and linode don’t charge a markup on their managed kubernetes at all, above their regular VPS pricing.
Heztner is much cheaper than both those options though, and they don’t have a managed kubernetes product