[pbowyer]

> Otherwise, there will be far easier solutions at lower scale.

Which solutions do you have in mind?

- VPS with software installed on the host

- VPS(s) with Docker (or similar) running containers built on-host

- Server(s) with Docker Swarm running containers in a registry

- Something Kubernetes like k3s?

In a way there's two problems to solve for small organisations (often 1 server per app, but up to say 3): the server, monitoring it and keeping it up to date, and the app(s) running on each server and deploying and updating them. The app side has more solutions, so I'd rather focus on the server side here.

Like the sibling commenter I strongly dislike the configuration management landscape (with particular dislike of Ansible and maintaining it - my takeaway is never use 3rd party playbooks, always write your own). As often for me these servers are set up, run for a bit and then a new one is set up and the app redeployed to that (easier than an OS upgrade in production) I've gone back to a bash provisioning script, slightly templated config files and copying them into place. It sucks, but not as much as debugging Ansible has.