I'm not convinced this is a great approach. Firstly, while dedicated servers are extremely good value (by my calculations they can be 100x cheaper for performa

I'm not convinced this is a great approach. Firstly, while dedicated servers are extremely good value (by my calculations they can be 100x cheaper for performance heavy workloads), for most SaaS they're not worth it due to operational requirements. I would, however, definitely look at them for cases where performance matters and the savings are really substanial, which for an early stage SaaS product, they aren't. I'd recommend using Heroku level solutions over more complex stacks to start with. For most use cases it works great, scales easily and the provider takes care of loads of underlying stuff. This won't work when you have a lot of developers and many apps and services to run, but it's premature optimisation to do anything more than that at the start and often in my experience ends up causing downtime due to overly complex infrastructure. You don't even need to use Docker to start with. Next, I definitely would not recommend hosting Postgres yourself at an early stage. Use a hosted provider for this! It's worth paying slightly more for someone else to manage one level of backups, the underlying OS and version patching for you! I have seen so many data loss incidents that wouldn't have happened on managed DB services. In one case it basically killed the business overnight. Even worse, it is hard to scale if you get hit with a load of traffic unexpectedly. You will not be able to provision VMs, configure read replicas etc quickly enough if you suddenly get hit with a load of users from some news article or blog. If it is hosted you have autoscale which will handle this for you. Finally - I would recommend using "CI/CD" from the start (I find it odd that maintaing CI is too much of a hassle, but running dedicated servers isn't!). Many reasons for this, but one is that you will be able to do small edits even from your phone (I'm not proposing big changes). Small copy changes for example - these can be really urgent but you may not have your laptop to hand. If you can edit source file and commit to SCM and have it build for you, it can get save your arse more than you'd think.