You’re already using blue/green for deployments, so why not:

* replace the currently inactive server with a smaller instance

* swap to the new instance and test the load

* replace the second server

For such a small app I’d drop the blue/green (most deploys will likely only take a few seconds?) and host Postgres on the same server.

Also, I’d move metabase onto a DO instance.

Any reason you’re using DNSSimple over a cheaper provider (or free in the case of DO)?

These are all my suggestions, I would also add look for ways to spread out tasks to other smaller VMs - the general pricing is +$5 "per" ($5 per +1 vCPU, $5 per +2G vRAM), a $5/$10 webserver only handle static asset delivery, then apps on middle tier app servers at $15/$20 would give better fault tolerance and spread out the load and still keep blue/green.

You can downsize, just start at a small size and don't increase storage (choose ram and cpu only when upgrading), then you can resize smaller if you want.

Getting to a place where you don't care as you can rotate in new instances at whatever spec you want is even better though.

Hey, good job on your project!

The only thing I wanted to say is that the time spent learning a bit of SQL pays off massively. Perhaps something for your todo list :)

Thanks. It's on my todo list ;-)

As a data point, we're using Redash (https://github.com/getredash/redash/), an alternative to Metabase, in a VM on Digital Ocean. It's a US$15 VM (2 cpu, 2GB ram) and seems to be fine. That's using a PostgreSQL instance running on the same VM, and nothing seems to be unhappy.

The graphs it generates are used both publicly (auto-updating):

https://sqlitebrowser.org/stats/

... and we have a bunch more private graphs and dashboards for metrics.

Everything is close to instant in responsiveness, apart from the "public" stats above. Those take some time to display purely on the browser side, as they feed way too much data to a browser for easy rendering. (will be fixed at some future point). ;)

Probably the only down side to Redash is a need to understand SQL. That can start out pretty simply though. :)

I am a big fan of redash.

It is really great in situations where non-SQL people ask if you can run a query or report for them.

It is amazing how quickly you can build up instrumentation with it.