You're right. We've been on Fly.io for 6 months[1] and it's been nothing but pain. ~10 years ago I took a start-up off an EC2 distributed set-up and moved them to a simple Dokku & Linode single VPS infra (plus separate staging env - https://github.com/glassechidna/dokku-graduate). Most content was served from S3 via a CDN, so workload was light. That simple VPS set up was super reliable and served us well for over 5 years. We eventually outgrew the infra and deployed a K8s cluster (on AWS). I left a short while after we were acquired, but I believe the K8s infra is holding strong. Unfortunately, this latest generation of PaaS really aren't living up to expectations.

[1] We're using so little infra at present that we're within their free usage tier. However, I want to clarify that this isn't because we aren't willing to pay, we specifically want to pay for reliable managed offerings. That's actually the entire point! If Fly.io can deliver on their vision, we'd gladly be billed at 100x the current usage rates.

This. It’s way more performant too, because you can host DB and other services from the same machine.

You don’t need to orchestrate a complex cluster to serve thousands or even millions of users. You can scale to hundreds of gigs of memory on a single machine nowadays.

Ops from scratch are annoying compared to the theoretical niceness of just pushing up a docker image.

Though I think a lot of this is incidental to just not really knowing the deal, and ops from scratch mean you have to make a lot of tiny decisions like "OK how do I get this package over here, how do I set it up, do I wipe the VM on OS-level udpates, do I need scripts for resetting the machine..." Having pre-made decisions for a bunch of questions means you aren't spending a bunch of time on tedious stuff when starting up a project.

Even with coolify or dokku you still have to manage the machine, those tools just simplify deployment. You still have to take care of host-level security and maintenance. Which is a hassle when all you really want is to stick your app somewhere and have it run.