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A single node Kubernetes "cluster" on DigitalOcean is $10/month. Adding a loadbalancer is another $15, but you can avoid that by using a hostNetwork ingress (https://stackoverflow.com/a/60726977/91365)

Single node Kubernetes is pretty silly on the surface, but it is useful in some cases.

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Nothing silly about it. Yes, with one node you don't have High Availability, but you get other benefits, like a standardized way to manage configuration.

What's the point of a load balancer if you only have one node? Am I dense or is the idea that you'd only use this if you started to have N numbers of nodes sitting behind the load balancer (e.g. $15 + N * $10)?

A Load Balancer is the standard way to set up an Ingress on Digital Ocean's Kubernetes. (Google's and Amazon's too). This makes sense for the vast majority of clusters, which will have more than one node. As usual, to do things the non-default way takes a little bit more work.

It can do things like handle SSL and traffic balancing.

So if you ever have more than one application e.g. a search engine for that blog then it's much easier to add. SSL in particular is often a real pain to setup and varies in capability wildly between applications.

For Digital Ocean, the ingress is handling SSL termination, not the load balancer. Ingresses can also do traffic balancing.

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