From a personal project perspective, I've maintained a few VPSes for quite a while now, but now I run them as a Docker Swarm, and deploy containers onto them - or better, I use serverless.

From a maintenance perspective, it's brilliant. Over time, cruft accumulates on my VPSes however disciplined I intend to be when I spin one up. Now, I no longer have to remember all of the ugly hacks I had to implement to get a particular new app I wanted to try out working, I just deploy and it's done.