Whenever we start deciding where to host a new web application, we run into an enormous range of options. The hosting market is full of platforms tailored to different needs — skill level, scaling expectations, monitoring requirements, preferred stack, and so on.
A quick search usually leads to a long list of services with flashy promises and complex pricing models. It’s easy to spend hours comparing them. Eventually, after too many cups of coffee, you make a choice… only to deploy the next day and discover a limitation that annoys you or even blocks something critical. Then you’re back to square one.
Here’s something many developers don’t want to hear:
In most cases, the chosen hosting solution is more complicated than the project actually needs.
A plain VPS is more than enough if the following applies to you:
A VPS is also the better choice if:
If these things resonate with you, a VPS not only works — it works better.
You will gain more freedom, fewer limitations, and long-term independence.
No proprietary feature can replace the freedom a VPS gives you:
You are in full control of the stack.
And unlike most proprietary hosting platforms, a VPS has a long and predictable lifespan. If you configure it today, you can keep using it for years without waking up one morning to discover that a pricing model changed, a tool was deprecated, or a “new mandatory build system” suddenly broke your deployment workflow.
Even in the worst-case scenario — CI/CD failure, provider outages, or deployment tooling going down — you can still SSH into the machine and deploy manually. You’re not dependent on anyone else’s infrastructure to push an update.
That level of stability, control, and independence is hard to beat.
A common argument against VPS is the time required to install and maintain a server. And that’s valid. Time is a cost and it should be part of the evaluation. I also use managed hosting when it is the more sustainable option.
However, consider this:
If you’re developing a web application — Laravel, Django, Express, Rails, or anything else — you already have a local development environment. It contains most of the components required in production. You already understand how it works.
So what is really stopping you from building your own production environment?
The truth is simple:
Being able to build your own production environment manually is one of the most valuable and transferable skills a developer can have.
Even if you later use a managed platform, that foundational knowledge does not go to waste. All platforms are built on the same fundamentals. Managed hosting simply adds layers of abstraction. When you understand the foundations, you know what’s happening behind the UI.
Also: the first setup is the investment.
It may take a day or two to learn and configure everything, but afterwards:
Spending an hour to set up a fresh VPS is insignificant compared to how much you save in the long run.
No matter the hosting solution, backups must be validated. Managed or self-built, recovery testing is still your responsibility.
Setting up backups today is not complex — you can use open-source tools, scripts, or built-in provider features like snapshots or scheduled backups, often at a low cost.
“What if something goes wrong?”
In my experience, modern Linux distributions on reputable VPS providers are extremely stable. Many managed platforms run on the same infrastructure anyway. Yes, managed platforms have better monitoring and support teams — but most incidents you will ever face come from:
Those are your responsibility regardless of the hosting model. Actual server or hardware failures are rare — and if they happen, snapshots and backups solve the problem.
Basic monitoring is already included with most VPS providers — CPU, memory, disk usage and threshold notifications. For the majority of small and medium projects, this is more than enough.
Everything stated so far applies primarily to projects with small teams and straightforward operational needs.
There are situations where a VPS is not the most sustainable choice, such as:
In cases like these, a managed hosting platform — or even a fully specialized PaaS solution — can absolutely be the more responsible option. Convenience, compliance, support and guaranteed service levels can outweigh the benefits of full control.
The position of this article is not that VPS is better in every possible situation.
It is simply that for the majority of smaller projects and teams, a plain VPS is often more than enough and dramatically more cost-effective.
For most projects, anything beyond a plain VPS is unnecessary overhead — financial, technical, and operational.
This is purely my personal opinion. Reasonable people will see it differently based on their priorities — and that’s perfectly fine.