> Setting up and maintaining a server is easier today than it was decades ago, A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing, reproducibility wasn't a goal, versioning was confidential, documentation was scarce and often outdated, out of the box security was lower, ties to the OS were higher. Managing virtual hosts was clunky, updating OS/PHP was risky. I would not go back for anything.
You are speeding past my point by a mile or two. With a shared webhost you get a ready lamp stack. In the late 90s early 2000s you could fairly easily get a wide array of software running that way. All you had to do is create a database in the hosters control panel, upload the package and you'd be on your way. Later in the 2000s one click installers came along for popular packages making it even easier. In fact, they are still around these days making it extremely easy to install a wide array of lamp based applications to these days.
There are very few options these days to get started as easily these days with modern non lamp tech stacks. The only thing I am familiar with (other than the product presented to us in this post) is pikapods, [which only offers a limited selection of available applications](https://www.pikapods.com/apps). There are a few others, also catalog based, though they more seem to focus on deploying on other platforms for you. Other than that you start to quickly move to more complex hosting solutions aimed at business and scaling. Or platforms that are cloud platforms with all the added complexity to navigate and figure out before you can deploy docker containers. Not to mention ridiculous situation that a few of the ones I know about have pivoted to being "agentic compute providers" whatever that means and certainly will confuse a novice.
Which means that the "practical" advice given is often to "just" set up a VPS. And yes, many VPS providers will provide an image with docker enabled, but that is just the start.
> Rootless being the proper way to setup Docker is a highly controversial take. You will mostly get added complexity and a false sentiment of security from it.
That, in fact, is another layer of complexity people will then have to figure out. Most information I am aware of these days does claim that it is better to run containers rootless or at the very least make sure the user in the container is non root. The fact that we are both convinced of the opposite tells you how confusing it must be for a novice.
The overall point I am trying to make isn't even about the exact details. It is that for hosting something these days there is much more required surrounding knowledge required before you can get started in most cases.