Same story in cloud. It takes less effort to write the program than to properly set up CI/CD, permissions, auth, auto-scaling, backup, monitoring, and so many more.
To be fair, bare-metal dedicated servers are still a thing, end up cheaper than the equivalent cloud offering on bandwidth alone (as they usually come with unmetered bandwidth), and you can just SFTP your project in there and run it with nohup (not saying it's a good idea, but if you're just playing around then it's perfectly fine).
I think that's doing it wrong because you don't need those features until you do... At which point you should invest in them. Otherwise, I don't see the benefit of having them. If all you end up with is one user.
