I built a site for my dad recently. There was no delusions that it was going to become the next YouTube or anything, but it does require a lot of number-crunchy

I built a site for my dad recently. There was no delusions that it was going to become the next YouTube or anything, but it does require a lot of number-crunchy stuff, so I could justify a slightly-beefier-than-the-minimum box on Hetzner. I had to resist every urge to do an elaborate Docker Swarm or Kubernetes setup, with replicated databases and async processing across message queues across different machines. I want to do that stuff, but realistically this site is going to get like 12 users a day at most, and doing that would have drastically increased the cost for really no perceivable benefit. I ended up just installing NixOS, and doing everything with Flakes, on a single machine with a Postgres database. It was cheap and easy, and it probably has saved me a lot of unnecessary headaches; most websites aren't going to be the next Google.