Decide between Heroku + Netlify vs DigitalOcean, or support deploying to both

[alanhamlett]

We use the Flask-Static-Compress extension to minify and bundle our static JS and LESS files. Heroku is nice, but we don't want to check these bundled files into git. We could use Netlify to automate running Flask-Static-Compress and host the static bundles, then point our Flask app running on Heroku to use Netlify's CDN as the STATIC_URL in our HTML/Jinja2 templates.

Or, we could use a linux virtual machine from DigitalOcean and run Flask-Static-Compress when deploying to the server and just host the bundles on the droplet's filesystem.

Heroku + Netlify is free unless we get more than 10k rows in our database, then it starts at $50/mo. Heroku will also sleep (turn off the server) after not being used for a while, so initial visits to the website will be slow around 10s. Paying $7/mo prevents dynos from sleeping. Heroku + Netlify automates the build/deploy process and they manage OS updates for us, but having no local filesystem is the downside... or upside.

DigitalOcean is $5/mo with practically unlimited (25GB) rows in the db, since it doesn't limit rows only SSD storage space. It's performance would be better than Heroku, but requires manually managing the server with OS updates and configuring our own build/deploy process.