No, I don't. And the specific practices at this company would be unpalatable to almost anyone. Package managers for dependency management, for example, were banned, because they made it too easy for the dependency list to grow in an uncontrolled manner.

There was a lot of homegrown software where others would use a library. That was deliberate. If you need five features, but choose an off-the-shelf package with 5,000 features, pretty soon you'll find that the list of features you're using has grown to 50, then 500, and so on, even if you don't actually need any of it. If a toy's in the box, the kids will play with it.

Maybe one thing to try is to focus on imposing constraints, and making people live within them. RAM, # of CPU cores, whatever. Software is like a gas. It will naturally expand to fill all available space.

Simple advise. Start with a 5 dollar droplet and increase ram / disk speed when required. If you reach 64 gigs consider spliting.

What I do is put my database on a droplet and my files on another and it can handles millions of requests. Put them on the same machine and I need to increase ram higher than the cost of multiple small droplets.

If you ever reach those limits consider setting up a load balancer.

In https://www.code-scope.com, the source code search engine database is in the same $5 droplet that run webserver - We are cheap. It is part of <10MB app which hopefully anyone can download soon. We figured the SSD can do 1-3GBs/second transfer, no point to slow it down with separate process or worst, separate network node.

All the web queries are responded in <<< 1 second - so far....