Basically reads as a Digital Ocean advertisement. Also couldn't you have saved even more money just adding LaTeX to each server and not having a dedicated LaTeX instance?
I mean LaTeX is consuming no resources, you stated that. It likely wouldn't slow down your back end server at all.
yes it does sound like an ad! but happy users are ads anyway. we owed them this! And we could not host latex instance in backend coz GAE (app engine) being a PAAS, does not let us install any other software.