generally speaking, isnt using vps a lot less expensive than a managed service like cloud run? im assuming the “websites” doesnt require to be always available 24/7 (hence the cold start is fine)?
really depends on the traffic, but even if you're service ends up running 24x7 you'll end up paying about 10 dollars for a 1CPU/0.5GB RAM instance. So for a lot of stuff Cloudrun will actually work out pretty cheap.
Don't underestimate cold starts though. Will be a long time until you need to worry about that if you're backend is written in Go or Rust, but you can hit painful starts pretty quickly when it's Nodejs. Really comes down to (unsurprisingly) image size.
If coldstarts are a problem, things like fly.io are incredible. Just set the minimum amount of instances to 1, pay 5$ a month and you don't need to deal with anything.
It wasn't immediately obvious to me how fly and Cloudrun compare, but the way I think about it now after having used both:
In Cloudrun you don't think about any servers, you give them your image and they'll do the rest. It feels serverless in the sense that you don't think about machines.
Fly meanwhile is much closer to the infrastructure. It feels more like "we deploy a docker image to a VM for you", which let's you much more granuarly control what's going on beyond that.
Less magic, but in a good way because more predictable results. Cloudrun has a few fun corners (like no CPU between requests unless you explicitly enable it) that can lead to fun side effects and just make it harder to reason about.
Ugh... I don't want to denigrate your advice (which I'm sure is great) but at this point in the comments we're getting so far away from the, "keep it simple" approach in the article that it's getting ridiculous.
If you're at the point where you're concerned about cold starts and using a service like fly.io why not just skip the (unbelievable, no-one-knows-this-stuff) complexity and use a $5/month VPS?
That's a fair point, but that's essentially what fly does.
If the only purpose of your VM is to serve your app (and not as a workspace for you or stuff like that), fly's great because you don't need to do any plumbing to deploy.
"Simply" using a 5$ VPS sounds great until you need to start writing systemd files, need to keep the box updated, want to deploy straight from GitHub,...
