I want to minimize the time it takes from making changes to my app to seeing them reflected in the final product. I don't have much experience running dockers and VPS's. Reflex offers a deployment solution but they won't allow us to use custom domains and they don't fully support all backend operations like databases. That's why I was looking for self-hosting options.
Vercel is the company behind NextJS and is popular, Netlify is also a common choice. My preference is GCP, though any of the major cloud providers are going to have a container based Cloud Run / ECS offering. Packaging it up into Docker is (mostly) a one time thing and typically very stable once you get it working.
install debian 11
learn firewalling (nft)
learn linux basics, ssh best practices etc.
forget all the websites that offer you a short way to deploy shit and the like, these all make you a slave to their ecosystem
install nginx/php|python/mysql|postgres
setup things
pure js, css+html is a must, learn it
upload your stuff, hooray
if you are not yet bleeding... you can celebrate.
or hire a sysop guy who creates the above system for you under some vps, so all you have to do is upload your thing to a folder and it will be served under a domain, that's all.
Write your app in PHP.
Create account on https://www.fortrabbit.com/.
Check out repo they provide.
Push your code to that repo.
Done.