I'm not totally following the cost analysis from some of these comments. I agree that there's no reason to make your architecture overly complicated, especially if it will cost dev time. I'm not saying this as someone that does cloud very much. We normally do a single server. More as an outsider looking in.
If you load balance 4 smaller ec2 instances vs a larger one, it's significantly cheaper. There is overhead when you run the same app on 4 machines, but not as much as people think. An idle system uses 300-600mb of ram, leaving roughly 3.5gb vram usable, per machine.
4 t3.medium instances are about $119/mo, vs. an equivalent t3.2xlarge which is $238/mo.
Also people will often say Digital Ocean is cheaper, but they compare it to non-equivalent AWS services. A Digital Ocean VPS compared to an equivalent EC2 is about the same.
So I understand when people argue about complicating architecture or optimizing prematurely, but I don't think the math on actual server cost really checks out. I would prefer to do dedicated hosting, but Hetzner doesn't have that in the U.S.
If you load balance 4 smaller ec2 instances vs a larger one, it's significantly cheaper. There is overhead when you run the same app on 4 machines, but not as much as people think. An idle system uses 300-600mb of ram, leaving roughly 3.5gb vram usable, per machine.
4 t3.medium instances are about $119/mo, vs. an equivalent t3.2xlarge which is $238/mo.
Also people will often say Digital Ocean is cheaper, but they compare it to non-equivalent AWS services. A Digital Ocean VPS compared to an equivalent EC2 is about the same.
So I understand when people argue about complicating architecture or optimizing prematurely, but I don't think the math on actual server cost really checks out. I would prefer to do dedicated hosting, but Hetzner doesn't have that in the U.S.