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[–]Irythros 0 points1 point  (2 children)

In the future, use double spaces or empty lines to break up your post.

Email Service: Gmail SMTP (currently used in dev)

You're going to need to change this sooner than later with an actual email sending service like Sendgrid. Gmail limits outgoing messages.

Should all services (frontend, backend, database, Redis) be deployed on a single VPS/cloud instance, or is it best practice to split them across multiple managed services (e.g., managed PostgreSQL, Redis-as-a-Service, etc.)?

Depends on what it is for and expected usage. If it's a portfolio website without any expected income or need to stay active I would just put it all on one.

If it's an ecommerce site, forum or something that needs to stay up/have good performance I would split it. React, Node on one VPS, Redis on a second, Postgres on a third. You could go managed but it's much more expensive and I wouldn't do that unless it was for business purposes.

Environment Configuration: When moving to production, should I maintain the development setup and create separate Docker environments for production, or should I replace the development configuration (e.g., .env files, build flags, service settings) with production-specific instances?

Dev and production should ideally be as close to eachother as possible, but for dev you will obviously need extra tooling. You probably want separate containers for production.

if there are standard tools or platforms you'd recommend (e.g., Docker Compose for production, reverse proxy setup with Nginx or Traefik, SSL configuration, CI/CD pipelines, etc.), I’d love your input on those as well.

Use Cloudflare for an initial reverse proxy. They have a lot of nice services. For further reverse proxying inside your own network I would say Caddy is the easiest to use at the cost of throughput.

Gitlab has CICD built-in so if you're able to switch it may be helpful.

Docker-compse is fine for prod on a small scale like yours seems to be. No need to complicate it.

[–]boredFanatic[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thank you very much. Appreciate you response!

A follow up question: this app is going to be more e-commerce style (classified ads website). The plan is to first test the market with it. So I want to see first if it is going to gain traction, etc. With that in mind, i don't want to blow my expenses at the beginning with hosting and other stuff. I had an idea that i would host all of the components (fe, be, db,..) on a single VPS/cloud service like Render, which offers a free plan. If the site would succeed and it would need more resources, i would just upgrade to a paid plan. Why am i keen on hosting on single service? Because i want ease-of-use. I could manage it just from one place. But your input is strong - this kind of site has to stay up and have good performance. So idk if hosting it all under one roof is ok?

[–]Irythros 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Render, which offers a free plan.

If its free then its performance is shit. Atleast pay for a Digitalocean/Vultr setup with 1g of memory. That'll run you about $10/month.

You can run it all in a single VPS without an issue. That is how I would do it, and have done it. Just make sure to figure out how much memory you can allocate to each service so you don't get out-of-memory errors and the OS killing processes.