Hey everyone,

We’re a team of four currently developing an app and we’re looking into hosting options.

Since we’re still at an early stage, we don’t really know how many users we’ll have. Maybe 10–20 initially, then hopefully 100, 1,000 or more over time.

We’re looking for something affordable to start with that allows us to scale resources as the number of users and the workload increase. We understand that hosting costs will grow as well, and that’s completely fine.

Our current stack:

• Backend: Node.js, NestJS, TypeScript
• Database: MongoDB
• Redis + BullMQ
• Socket.IO
• SeaweedFS for file storage
• ClamAV
• Frontend: Flutter (Web and Mobile)
• Docker Compose

We’ve looked at providers like Hetzner and Netcup, but we’re still unsure what would make the most sense for our setup.

Would you start with everything on a single VPS or separate certain services from the beginning? Which hosting providers would you recommend, and how easy is it to scale later?

We’re comfortable with Linux and Docker, so managing a server ourselves wouldn’t be an issue.

I’d be interested to hear what server specs you’d recommend for the beginning and how hosting costs typically develop as usage grows.