For software companies, a VPS is not just where the application runs; it is infrastructure for staging, testing, workers, queues, databases and deployment automation. Good architecture separates failure domains and access privileges.
Yes. A small team can start on one VPS with Docker Compose. As the product grows, sharing the same resource pool between production database and staging/test becomes risky. The first separation is often production versus staging, followed by database, workers and CI runners.
Public traffic reaches the reverse proxy; app containers access database, cache and queue through private networking. Database ports need not be public.
Separation is not just domain names; secrets, databases, storage and deployment permissions should differ too.
A running container does not mean a healthy application; inspect healthchecks and logs together.
docker compose psdocker stats --no-streamdocker compose logs --tail=100docker system dfss -lntpdf -hCI/CD and developer access should use separate identities and least privilege.
The first service to separate should be chosen from bottleneck and risk data; Kubernetes is not mandatory just because it is fashionable.
One VPS can be enough initially; separating production and staging is a common first step. Scale from measured usage.
It can be for a few light containers, but databases, builds or queues may exceed it. Measure actual container usage.
No. Docker Compose or a simple multi-node design can be enough. Choose Kubernetes based on operational needs.
Share PHP/Node/Python, Docker, database, queue and traffic details; we can plan from a single VPS to scalable infrastructure.