I still just use VPS devices and some colocated hardware.

I'm constantly told "I am not the typical customer, most do use K8s".

Side projects and volunteer things I run include 470 websites serving about 320K registered users and about 500K-1M monthly guest users... on about 15 VPS devices or small servers.

It's just classic dynamic websites, HTML is the output of a server (no single page web apps), lots of caching for guest users, reasonable complexity (load balancers ahead of web front ends ahead of API back ends ahead of databases).

Things that look like microservices exist... it's just API calls, and they come back through the front door, it's easy to reason about.

Monitoring is mostly Prometheus node exporter, it turns out that CPU + Memory + Disk IOPS + Network IOPS is +90% of what you need... some HTTP logs or profiles are the last 10%.

It's just simple... this is run in my spare time, effort is under an hour per month. (and no it's not monetised, not everything has to be)