Yeah, there was a multiple dev long effort to build "complete" solution but I did what you described to satisfy impatient stakeholders. Since then the fancy solution is incomplete and mothballed while the simple deployment has been running ever since.
The next value add was consolidating data in a db with web ui so relevant non-devs can view and help add to it + easily integrate different data sources with automatic validation. I wish their was a nice open source thing here you could spin up without much effort. There's middle ground between complex/paid full solution that can scale to huge data sets and integrate with turking etc and emailing csvs or sharing google sheets links around.
- cloudflare free tier for caching, DNS, page rules, etc
- run everything on one VPS(digital ocean, linode, etc) pick cheapest that has specs you need
- any non-trivial storage (media, big files) move to Backblaze B2 it's cheap (you can use free tier cloudflare workers to redirect to B2 for free bandwidth due to Bandwitdth Alliance)
- free static page from Netifly (I can redirect to this with cloudflare in case my VPS falls over or something to provide info/links)
- If I want to look at logs or something I rsync it my local machine (if I cared I could set up a process to push logs/backup etc to private B2 bucket)
You may not need exact same setup, I am optimizing for caching and cheap storage because my site stores/serves lots of media files.
The next value add was consolidating data in a db with web ui so relevant non-devs can view and help add to it + easily integrate different data sources with automatic validation. I wish their was a nice open source thing here you could spin up without much effort. There's middle ground between complex/paid full solution that can scale to huge data sets and integrate with turking etc and emailing csvs or sharing google sheets links around.