I was quite inexperienced - 1 year after graduating from art school - when I joined and started working on this project. The server went down 5x in a single day because of all the requests. We were using web sockets (simple node server with express + socketio and a react + rxjs frontend) and that put some strain on the server. And I made the rookie mistake of storing images directly into the database instead of in a S3 bucket. Also we chose CouchDB, which saves document revisions (I didn't know..) so at the end of the day the database took 100% disk space and I couldn't SSH into it anymore. There were something like 20M+ database writes within 24hrs of the launch because it went viral.
We span up larger DO droplets several times because of this issue which took a while to fix.
It was my first time setting up / working with a VPS and nginx + sockets as well, so I'm actually quite pleased with only 15-30mins downtime overall on launch day :)
I learned a lot during that time (it was made in 2016), especially with the help of HN. Projects are often developed by junior devs or people skilled in other areas. Some experience is useful when deploying scalable apps. Nowadays it's much more easy with services like Vercel/Cloudflare/Heroku/AWS/etc. We used SFTP to deploy the site. I think I moved it to a Docker container some time after that.
I'm still using DigitalOcean to this day for my personal stuff, only now I use Dokku + Cloudflare - which works like a charm.
Check out https://studiomoniker.com if you want to see more crazy projects! (They're my previous employer FYI).
Sorry about that! There may be an initiative to update it in the near future.
I do statically-render everything, so not doing that is the only reason I can think of for why so many sites might be going down when they get up on the front page. Many of these are blogs so could probably do much better, though I did see someone mention that this one uses websockets for something, so it would definitely be doing some logic on the server-side and wouldn't be able to go fully static.
I'm hosting 30+ apps (frontends / api's / cms's / other processes) on a single 5eu/mo DigitalOcean droplet. I believe Hertzner is the cheapest hosting provider with a 2,87eu/mo VPS.
Self-hosting is a lot of fun, and cheaper. Dokku has been around for several years, it's an open-source Heroku clone and I would recommend it to anyone looking into deploying web apps.
Edit: I see DigitalOcean has it available as a 1-click install. Do you get totally automatic updates/system management and everything with that?
Some config changes fixed it right up, but my point is that it's not just the capabilities of the instance, the default http server configs might need some tweaking too.
(Static sites should be fine, but many sites use dynamic CMS like wordpress, ghost or discourse, on very low-powered hosts, which really need a caching layer to hold up under non-trivial load)
Blog written in PHP but without database interaction