I got a contract with this schools to build a student portal,

I do all the needful and the project whatever guy insists that I use their current shared hosting to host this MERN stack application.

first of all, cPanel is my least favorite place when it comes to deploying, I actually dont do deploying I just hand it over to whoever is the IT guy there.

I discovered there's no provision for nodejs in their current plan, I go through all the stress of contacting the shitty customer support and the process of squeezing out useful information from them.

I'm only doing this because the project whatever has refused to pay me until their site is deployed. throughout the process of creating this project I had setup continous deployment on heroku and netlify and I had to beg this guy to look at the changes and review them.

well, today I asked the former guy that built the current site for the login details to the schools dashboard on the hosting providers site and he says he used his personal details for it, according to him projects from other organizations are there too.

I swear I'm going to loose my shit, freelancing sucks

Heroku/Render

Deploy 2 apps
app #1 sends request to app #2 every minute
app #2 sends request to app #1 every minute
they never sleep
profit?

I'm thinking of self hosting all my small web projects,

I have this old laptop running ubuntu server heedlessly I used to store and stream pirated movies, after multiple embarrassing moments with free backend/platform as a service options and not finding a cheap VPS, this seems like the way to go. I don't get much traffic on these sites i just want them to be available when i need to present them.

then there's tons of other features that are locked behind a paywall,

I once had to store images in the database because heroku wont accept file uploads and the project hadn't been paid, in short, I was dead broke