One of our clients handles non-trivial usage with a setup that is not much more complicated. They use hosted db (like AWS RDS or MongoDB Atlas), an external se

One of our clients handles non-trivial usage with a setup that is not much more complicated. They use hosted db (like AWS RDS or MongoDB Atlas), an external service for some user data (sorta like Firebase to handle user accounts, paid/free entitelments, etc) and I believe also a server image on AWS to quickly be able to recreate a clean server if something goes wrong. Deployment is done with a webhook on git push and a local script that does some folder swapping. For the rest the application (500k+ active users) is a single machine with apache+php for prod and clones of it for testing. Thanks to php request-response model there is little to no server-side state out of the db so if load where to become excessive they could slap a load balancer and manually spin up a second server. If your business model is different from "must get a ton of views" or "let's monopolize this market" this should be quite enough.