> You can just rent 2 and spin up/down containers.

Missing what point? You are apparently agreeing with me and disagreeing with the OP who said: "can run on a raspberry pi or mini PC".

No, you most definitely can just spin up/down containers on a raspberry pi or mini PC as well.

This is what I objected to:

> And then, you probably want to do deployments in a way where you spin up 2 new machines and then, only once confirmed that the deployment works, shut down the old 2.

You don't need to spin up more machines or shut down machines. As long as you ensure you have the headroom you spin up containers and shut down containers. By doing that, it's also relatively easy to set up hybrid setups where you can handle load-spikes by scaling into EC2 or similar if you should ever need to.

> As long as you ensure you have the headroom you spin up containers and shut down containers.

Are you very sure you are not introducing potential additional problems with that approach? Because if you do, then I wouldn't say it's "not needed" to spin more additional machines - it would depend on those additional problems.

Yes, I am, very much sure of that, based on 20 years of experience deploying containers that way, and nearly the same length of experience using cloud instances. They are equivalent in complexity. It is purely down to how you want to host things and whether cost matters to you - the managed approach is consistently significantly cheaper for all but the very, very smallest environments where factors like discounts and free tiers play in.