Before long you also need CI/CD pipelines (to test and deploy your application), log exfiltration, monitoring, TLS, DNS, database backups (and ideally replicati

Before long you also need CI/CD pipelines (to test and deploy your application), log exfiltration, monitoring, TLS, DNS, database backups (and ideally replication), database migrations, secrets management, and so on. In reality you probably need redundancy of your application and databases as well, with load balancing, etc. You'll also want a couple of additional environments, and things are probably complex enough that it justifies some infrastructure as code so you can (more or less) stamp out these environments and keep them in sync with your production environment (and also so you can rebuild prod in case of catastrophic failure). You can definitely get there if you're using your own machines, but a PaaS or cloud provider will get you there a lot faster.