At the beginning of 2017, I decided to build an MVP for Statuspal. I had heard of Elixir and Phoenix, and how they were inspired by Ruby and RoR, but improved on its shortcomings like concurrency and performance, at the same time the fact that it was a functional programming language sounded appealing as I had been meaning to try a functional language for a while.I was able to put together a functional prototype relatively quickly, and I was impressed by Elixir’s performance. I got away with deploying it to a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet running in production without any caching for at least the first two years.