But I wanted decent deployments. Hosting a image repository cost 3-4x of the server. Sending over the container image took over an hour due to large image processing python dependencies.
Solution? Had a think and a chat with Claude code, now I have blue-green deployments where I just upload the code which takes 5 seconds, everything is then run by systemd. I looked at the various PaaSes but they ran up to $40/month with compute+database etc.
I would probably never have built this myself. I'd have gotten bored 1/3 through. Now it's working like a charm.
Is it enterprise grade? Gods no. Is it good enough? Yes.
When using them with production code they are a liability more than a resource.