I always found bookmark apps to be missing the features I needed to I ended building my own open-source bookmarking tool back in 2015 and I still use it to this day. I'll share it here in case it's helpful to any of you.
I agree, I deliberately generalised with those examples to make a little clear that as the required traffic, capacity and risk increases there's a lot of benefits with using services that automatically configure and provisions load balancers, network routers, machines, clusters, etc for you.
This is not to say that it's a "one click configuration+deploy with no security issues whatsoever" , but depending on the clients you work with you may be rightfully forced into using a cloud provider and hire DevOps engineer to manage the infrastructure.
Depending on how you provision the services (e.g. infrastructure as code) you may not be locked in at all and switching to a new provider is relatively straight forward. This comes up quite often in infosec questionnaires for DRP, so if you're hosting mission critical applications you must be read for a backup plan and switch to a new vendor if required.
Why do you need to use a major service though? There's a ton of cloud providers you can use that offer pretty much a similar range of services and are certified, e.g. ISO27001, SoC2.
Nowadays there's such an abundance of PaaS that in my opinion it doesn't make any sense anymore to get a VPS and manage it yourself, unless you're willing to potentially spending numerous hours in DevOps yourself in both initial setup and maintenance, but more importantly you're aware of the implications when you go past the traffic it can physically serve.
Furthermore, managing your own server potentially leaves more room open for misconfigurations (including backups) and definitely won't get you past any information security questionnaire.
Yes, tell me about not needing the cloud (aka a managed provisioning and scaling service) when your poorly configured database breaks, or when you need a 3 hours downtime on prod because you need to reboot and reconfigure your services, or your release breaks production because you're using a diff tool to run deployments, or you simply have no option to scale horizontally past your single vps once traffic comes in.
Very clickbait article, please don't blindly follow recommendations by someone which obviously doesn't get services even like Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda and Identity management (:shrugh:).
Sure, a VPS is fine for a low risk pet project like your portfolio, a blog, some marketing websites, the project I built over the weekend and a few other things. For anything else, there's literally not a single reason for not wanting to use a cloud service / a managed provider.
Running it on your own should take minutes as it's just a Meteor app, so anything like a cheap ubuntu box with node.js and meteor would do.