* staging environment for development
* at least another baremetal machine for a copy of production and a loadbalancer in front of them, to prevent from 100% downtime in case your machine is down
Maybe those other things were there, maybe they weren't but it wasn't about what you should do, just what he did.
I don't find it fair to praise your tech-stack for simplicity and being cheap (awesome features btw) and fail to mention resilience. Unless you run a service that can be down 10% of time for example. Not the case here I guess since we talk about SaaS.