I’ve been happy with Dokku hosted on DigitalOcean with the Postgres plugin for persistance and the Grafana plugin for stats gathering (optimizing for validated learning). I have a base image of that on DO for new projects. (Also Dokku Postgres takes care of cron-based encrypted backups which it will happily store on DO Spaces; in case anything happens to your server) I use Node on the backend with a simple passport-based session cookie auth and the apollo GraphQL server for APIs. I use nuxt for isomorphic (progressive?) vue components along with the Apollo vue module to communicate with the GQL server.