Comment by afiodorov
18 hours ago
I've found that building my side projects to be "scalable" is a practical side effect of choosing the most cost-effective hosting.
When a project has little to no traffic, the on-demand pricing of serverless is unbeatable. A static site on S3 or a backend on Lambda with DynamoDB will cost nothing under the AWS free tier. A dedicated server, even a cheap one, is an immediate and fixed $8-10/month liability.
The cost to run a monolith on a VPS only becomes competitive once you have enough users to burn through the very generous free tiers, which for many side projects is a long way off. The primary driver here is minimizing cost and operational overhead from day one.
> A dedicated server, even a cheap one, is an immediate and fixed $8-10/month liability.
Personally, I am more worried about the infinitely-scalable service potentially (liability) sending a huge bill after the fact. This "liability" of $8-10 is predictable, like a Netflix subscription.