I can see why you'd wanna go to something like DO/Linode for that. It's a relatively fixed cost up front. This is all anecdotal but at work we recently switche

I can see why you'd wanna go to something like DO/Linode for that. It's a relatively fixed cost up front. This is all anecdotal but at work we recently switched from marketing sites/blogs on internal infrastructure to farming them out to DO. The biggest concern with the person who manages our fleet is the security implications of handling multiple machines outside our network. In just a very minimal amount of Google fu I found a plethora of management services that do the work you're talking about on your VPS infrastructure. Some specialize in just DO but a large number are relatively cloud agnostic. We have also just recently invested in using Laravel Forge for provisioning and it's relatively trivial to write a script that will run 'sudo apt-get update' but proper security usually requires a bit more than that. Package upgrades to major versions can sometimes cause quite a bit of havok. Having a service or team of individuals that can keep this brain power to handle your case properly is often more than worth the price to someone like me. Finding the right one is its own chore but from my limited search there's quite a lot out there to cover just how hands off you want to be.