Those are fair points for side projects that have no visitors, but at least for me a side project can also have quite some traffic and then even a little timeou

Those are fair points for side projects that have no visitors, but at least for me a side project can also have quite some traffic and then even a little timeout may not be an option. Plus you get a ton of goodies by relying on k8s (or similar) - ability to do an easy rollout, rollback, blue-green deployments, partial rollout, ability to replace multiple containers together if frontend and backend containers must be in sync (a pod) etc. Just my 2 cents.