idk it costs me like 6 dollars to run a docker container on aws's container service with .5 core. one server by hand isn't to bad, once you want to scale horizontally its going to be tedious, the tools start getting annoyingly complex. locking down everything is a headache, and theres always a nagging feeling that you didn't do it right and one well timed script from getting taken over. you also need to deal with code deploys. just dumping the python code in a docker container and uploading it is easy. updating a hand set up server, again is tedious and error prone.
Sure it's not for everyone. I learnt a lot doing cash strapped startups where there wasn't a devops person. AWS can get expensive, especially when you start using more and more services (lambda,dynamodb,rds,elasticache etc) although it can be easily scaled.
Note, you probably shouldn't do it by hand (setting up your own servers). You'd use Ansible/Terraform.
For those that are interested but not quite ready, here's a great article [0].
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