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?

Re scaling: I also considered using an external Postgres provider, allowing me to scale the "worker" services horizontally when needed.

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