Option one: do it yourself
Rent a server from a provider like Hetzner or DigitalOcean, install what you need, and run it. A capable 4 GB machine costs somewhere between $9 and $24 a month.
This wins when you have someone technical who enjoys this work and has time for it. Nothing else comes close on price, and you keep complete control.
It fails when that person leaves, gets busy, or goes on holiday. The server does not stop needing patches because the one person who understood it is unavailable. The cheapest option on paper becomes the most fragile in practice.
Option two: a platform
Push code to Render, Fly or a similar platform and it deploys. Expect $50–100 a month once a database and a couple of services are running.
This wins when you have developers who ship frequently. Deployment is genuinely excellent and the ergonomics are hard to beat.
It fails when the problem is not deployment. Platforms do not renew your domain, chase a mail provider about deliverability, or ring you when something looks wrong. Support is a ticket queue, and it is scoped to their platform, not your business.
Option three: managed
Someone else runs the infrastructure and is accountable for it. Expect anywhere from $50 to several hundred a month depending on size and service level.
This wins when nobody on the team wants the job, and the cost of an outage is larger than the cost of the subscription. You are not buying servers — you are buying somebody else's attention.
It fails when you have strong technical staff who would rather own it, or when your requirements are unusual enough that a standard stack fights you.
The comparison people get wrong
Managed hosting gets compared to raw servers on price per gigabyte, and loses badly. A 4 GB machine is $9 somewhere. Any managed offer is several times that.
But nobody is actually choosing between a managed plan and a bare server. They are choosing between a managed plan and a bare server plus the hours to run it. Leave the hours out and the comparison is meaningless.
An honest test
Ask two questions. First: if the person who set this up left tomorrow, would anyone know how to renew the certificates? Second: how would you find out something was broken — a monitor, or a customer?
If the answers are "nobody" and "a customer", the cheapest option is not the one you are on.