If your 55k MAU want uninterrupted service, they need to be paying for it (in dollars or monetisable attention and/or privacy).
On a site currently generating zero revenue, I hope the OP is happily enough paying most of that $145/month as a learning experience or for resume bullet points (which are perfectly valid was to spend your money). They've admitted elsewhere in the comments that the two $40/month droplets are way oversized (from an attempt to solve a problem that turned out not to be droplet size/resource related) - so without redundancy and without AWS hosted metabase, this would be about $100/month less expensive to run.
I still think that's over provisioned or under engineered. Like others have commented, I'd be surprised if the features you can see on the site require any more than the $15/month the FAQ claims it costs to run, plus perhaps the $10/month Discus expenses. That seems about where a hobby/side-gig project should sit for a lot of devs before you start thinking about how to make it pay for itself... YMMV, especially if you're not comfortable earning at least junior dev salary already in some reasonably well paying part of the world.
On a site currently generating zero revenue, I hope the OP is happily enough paying most of that $145/month as a learning experience or for resume bullet points (which are perfectly valid was to spend your money). They've admitted elsewhere in the comments that the two $40/month droplets are way oversized (from an attempt to solve a problem that turned out not to be droplet size/resource related) - so without redundancy and without AWS hosted metabase, this would be about $100/month less expensive to run.
I still think that's over provisioned or under engineered. Like others have commented, I'd be surprised if the features you can see on the site require any more than the $15/month the FAQ claims it costs to run, plus perhaps the $10/month Discus expenses. That seems about where a hobby/side-gig project should sit for a lot of devs before you start thinking about how to make it pay for itself... YMMV, especially if you're not comfortable earning at least junior dev salary already in some reasonably well paying part of the world.