Don't get me wrong, I love that stack and it's what I generally use professionally, but for a small personal project that may or may not live for a whole year,

Don't get me wrong, I love that stack and it's what I generally use professionally, but for a small personal project that may or may not live for a whole year, I'd go for something cheap and cheerful, the difference between $5 a month and $30 is $300 a year - that's a whole lot of pizza and beer! ;) FWIW - Setting up Let's Encrypt doesn't seem much of a chore these days: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-18-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secu... For my particular use-case (a personal blog) the software I wanted to run on a VPS had support for it so all I really had to do was install everything answer a few configuration questions and I was up and running.