For the last couple of months I've been working on a side project I'd now finally like to publish.

I developed and packaged everything into a few small docker containers (2 python apps, 1 postgres db, and 1 db cleanup script in another container. I'll likely also add some reverse proxy like Nginx or Caddy) and run it locally using docker-compose, with all secrets in a .env file (although I could use docker secrets)

I thought about either using a managed Kubernetes service from a provider like DigitalOcean, or setting up a vServer from scratch with the help of some online guides and ChatGPT/Claude (as I don't have a lot of infrastructure experience).

What is your guys go-to-stack? Any recommendations that are relatively simple (or well-documented) to setup while still being cost-efficient and easy to scale? What are your experiences with services like dokku or dokploy?

Asked here because I'm sure it might be relevant for others, too. Thanks in advance!