Spinning up a DO droplet with an Ubuntu image and installing dokku is pretty darn close to Heroku ease of use when weighed against the cost/performance as well.

Spinning up a DO droplet with an Ubuntu image and installing dokku is pretty darn close to Heroku ease of use when weighed against the cost/performance as well. Just configure ufw and sshd and you're off to the races. It's not exactly a hardened setup, but most side projects don't have much user data to start (or ever?).