I am a student without lots of disposable income, and I primarily deploy smaller Phoenix apps which don't get much traffic. I build releases locally with Distillery, and then deploy them in Docker containers on a $15/mo Digital Ocean server.

Docker allows me to run various Phoenix/Elixir apps with various versions of the language and framework since I don't have time to update all of them. My method also allows me to compile .tar.gz releases on my local machine since the lower-tier servers that I can afford don't always have enough memory to compile there.

Here's a tutorial I wrote on how I deploy my Phoenix apps if anyone is interested: https://gist.github.com/jswny/83e03537830b0d997924e8f1965d88....