A single small VPS (or a home server) runs a FastAPI + React app comfortably. No containers needed: the frontend is static files, the API is one Python process under systemd, and nginx sits in front of both.

What you need

An Ubuntu server (22.04 or newer) you can SSH into

A domain with two DNS records pointing at the server: example.com (the site) and api.example.com (the API)

Your app's code, with the backend managed by uv

1. Prepare the server

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y nginx curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh # installs uv for your user

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Open only what you need with the firewall:

sudo ufw allow OpenSSH && sudo ufw allow 'Nginx Full' && sudo ufw enable

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2.…