I actually would recommend not using Heroku (after we used it for the first few months literally starting from 0 users at that time) at all if you know at least

I actually would recommend not using Heroku (after we used it for the first few months literally starting from 0 users at that time) at all if you know at least a bit what you are doing. Just get a VPS somewhere and run on that. You will easily have way more RAM, CPU and disk for the same price so that you can be quite inefficient and still have a snappy backend. Doing backups more or less properly at small scale isn't a big deal either. GitHub Actions or such is just fine for build, test and deploy. You just don't need red/ green deployments, complex pipelines, high availability and such at the beginning. Btw. do what counts and don't do DevOps for the sake of DevOps. I am not saying, hack everything together. If you have no clue about infrastructure, please use Heroku. :-) I am just saying, you can get very far with rather great performance, stability and security by using a VPS and some backup. You will learn some useful skills along the way and frankly, you don't have to care much about performance because even the second or third cheapest tier will be way more than what Heroku can offer at multiple that price. I mean "Performance L" in the Advanced tier of Heroku is ~ $500/ month with 14 GB RAM, I cannot see how much CPU/ disk etc. At OrgPad, we would probably need that one. The whole infrastructure, with disaster recovery and everything, costs so much less, we could run our infrastructure for a year with that much money. And yes, languages are mostly fine with today's HW. Look at SQL/ IO first.