To Contain, or not To Contain?

I've been using AWS Elastic Beanstalk to create EC2 instances with Node.js installed. When you create an Elastic Beanstalk environment you give it a zip file containing your app. It automatically unzips it and calls npm install and npm start for you. Very simple.

This is a weird way to approach the question. What specific problems do you have that containers will solve? There are advantages to using containers, but they also incur significant costs in complexity. If you can’t point to specific issues that you truly can’t solve without containers, you don’t need them.

I've tried both ways and I don't think it's worth using Kubernetes or something else in the early stage. It's significantly harder to set up, even in managed environment. You have to take care of the CI/CD process, certificates, etc. And I didn't find any completely free provider.
Using something like Heroku can save a lot of time for you which is really important in the earliest stage.

For my own personal projects? No containers, no Docker.

This really depends on what your use case is. If you are working with user code doing builds or running code absolutely do not use docker, it is pretty simple to escape the container and control the machine it is running on.

I’ve been using VMs firefly on digital ocean. I find it easier, but then again I’m not that skilled at docker. I know how to use images but creating im not that great