- wakes up on for a request(few seconds delay on request),
- stays awake (requests are fast here),
- goes back to sleeping if idle for sometime (15mins?)
This is what keeps the costs low (or free). Same is true for Heroku, Lambda, Vercel, Azure Functions, etc.
Last time I checked I wasn’t renting a server, it was supposed to be a service that’s fast at any scale.
A 5$ DO instance would provide much better experience. They should give an option to keep it awake albeit at a cost.
Cloudflare Workers are probably the best option in terms of cold starts and latency but are much more limited than other services.
But I would recommend using Cloud Run instead.
This gives user low latency if the service is being used
If I've to launch DO server in 10 region, it will cost me $50 even if I am receiving a few request per day.