I was initially enthousiastic about sandstorm when I encountered it, but in the end my preferred solution for self hosting has been Docker Swarm. Dead simple setup, low maintenance, everything easily deployable within Swarm (crons, backups, first deployment setup, reverse proxy config incl. certificates, etc).

Additionally a lot of projects provide a Docker compose file which is mostly compatible with swarm. I started using Swarm [1] when k8s was already ruling, but never regretted my choice.

1: https://www.yvesdennels.com/posts/docker-swarm-in-2022/