always interested in self hosted solutions, not tried sandstorm and up for giving it a go, however if I was starting a small fairly simple personal project with no need to scale can I get wheels on it with Tempest, or should I consider building on sandstorm then porting?
All of the dev tools use Sandstorm, and Tempest is not at this point, "complete". But if you were to build something on Sandstorm today, you can be reasonably confident it will work with Tempest.