You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day. You aren't required to implement every enterprise pattern in the book.
If there is any single service I'd avoid on AWS it's Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there, is slow as molasses (even tiny services can need tens of minutes to deploy) and you'll experience random failures not even AWS reps can explain to you. Avoid at all costs.
It's a ghost of its former self, but I'd probably still rather use Heroku today than being forced to use Lightsail even once again.
>Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there,
Lightsail is pretty competitive (price wise) with other providers. Been running s B2B app on it for a few years now - nothing much, just your basic crud app running on lightsail instance + lightsail db. Nice to have a "monthly" rate on each instead of the EC2 opaque (and "surprise!") pricing.
I have only use lightsail for one project with two VPSs, but it just works like a VPS (two, because we have another for staging). Price is competitive.
> You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day
You could do this, but for the life of me I can't imagine why you do this over using a platform like DO, vultr, hetzner or any one of a hundred similar services that will give you a better developer experience for this kind of workflow, often at a fraction of the price
GCP has similar offerings to Lightsail, Fargate, EC2, Lambda, or other compute substrates. Nobody is forcing you to use more than “basic” offerings. AWS core services are often architected that way!
But that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.
This sentence beautifully encapsulates my point. I know that this is just ordinary jargon, but wow that's a lot all at once. And it does seem like something I need to know before I start.
sure but on the flip side - when I signed up for vercel I had literally no idea what was going on. It just said "do you want to start a blog? here are 1000 templaptes"
