There are other ways to deploy as well! You can build a docker image for your application and then deploy that image to an environment that can run containers, for example. This is a great deployment method for being able to reliably deploy your environment, but it carries a number of other gotchas associated with it, such as having to deal with having docker running on your target environment which may not be an option. It can also be tricker to allow multiple separate Phoenix instances to communicate with each other.

You can also deploy BEAM binaries using tools like the fantastic Distillery. Distillery is centered around creating release files that can include the entire Erlang runtime and all dependencies, allowing you to deploy your application to an environment that may not have the full stack of running applications available to it!

In addition, another approach is to deploy your application in a managed environment such as Heroku. This carries with it its own set of concerns and advantages which could easily eat up most of this book on its own. Ultimately, there are a lot of different alternate strategies for deployment that are worth investigating if you're concerned about the approach of running your application directly!