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44 Comments

Which hosting do you use and why?

I'm using digital ocean and happy with it so far! I use it mainly because their support team is quite responsive and I've found their prices reasonable too.

  1. 7

    Google and Amazon are expensive and a bit complex to understand.
    Digital Ocean and Linode were my favorites. Cheap, good quality and a simple to understand interface.
    Hetzner is one that I discovered recently. Cheaper than DO and Linode. Only on server in Europe.

    My preferences right now

    1. Hetzner (if your customers are in Europe)
    2. Linode (better backups than Digital Ocean and same price)
    3. Digital Ocean (the best documentation)
    4. Google Cloud (The best and cheapest backup site. But the servers are expensive compared to the previous ones)
    5. Amazon. The only good thing is that sometimes you can get free credits. It's too expensive
    1. 1

      This is the best answer. Though I'd put a colocated server service [1] on the top. Or at the zeroth level, if you will.

      [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/

  2. 5

    At Keypup we use Google Cloud Platform. I like GCP because I find their overall environment to be developer friendly.

    A few highlights:

    • Cloud Run allows you to make serverless applications which were not designed for it (e.g. Rails). Billing is per millisecond of computing. It allows a scale down to zero, which is particularly useful for test environments which are not used all the time.
    • Cloud Tasks allows us to schedule background jobs and leverage our serverless runtime to execute our jobs
    • Pub/Sub also us to easily share data between our serverless components
    • Identity and access management is relatively simple to manage (personal view)
    • Their SDK/libraries automatically authenticate themselves based on the role of the runtime (e.g. in Cloud Run), which makes using their API quite easy.
    • Monitoring & tracing is relatively cheap compared to other services (e.g. New Relic). However it requires a bit more configuration (especially the tracing part)
    • Their startup program is very generous in terms of credits

    I've also used AWS extensively in the past.

    My overall feeling when comparing GCP to AWS is the following:

    • AWS is infrastructure as a service with services on top. It gives sysadmins the power to completely control the infrastructure layer (network routing & policies etc..) in details at the cost of greater complexity. I always find there is more plumbing to do on AWS than GCP.
    • GCP is platform as a service with advanced settings if required. It gives developers a way to quickly get started quickly with a lot of prebuilt services (DB, messaging, AI) thanks to its SDKs. However the out-of-the-box aspect makes it so it requires more digging when you want to control things at the network layer. AWS is more transparent on this aspect.
  3. 5

    DigitalOcean, if I ever leave them I am sure I will still use their documentation. Their documentation is the best I have ever seen.

  4. 4

    OVH, DigitalOcean, & Vultr

  5. 4

    Digital ocean all day long, because everything about it's easy to understand, predict, and setup. Their tutorials and docs are awesome. AWS feels like being at the DMV in comparison.

    1. 1

      What's your tech stack?

      1. 1

        I prefer Elixir, but also use PHP/Laravel and NodeJS for my day job a lot.

        1. 1

          That's great. I use React (Next.js), Styled Component, most of the time.

  6. 3

    I have been with Hetzner Cloud for a couple of years. They offer IMO the best value for the money. Cloud servers with really good performance delivered in seconds for a fraction of the price the others charge. I am saving a ton of money with them.

  7. 3

    Hetzner.de bare metal servers. Running databases on this (postgres), must be roughly 100x cheaper than managed cloud offerings, if not more

  8. 3

    OVH used em for years cheap bulk pricing for vps; Vulptr is even cheaper but personally haven't tried them.

  9. 3

    I like DigitalOcean. I know, it's not perfect, you have to do a lot of things be your own, but when you get used to it's really convenient and not expensive.

  10. 3

    Depends on what part of the world I want to serve. For Europe I like to use Hetzner because they are unbeatable cheap, easy to use and they use renewable energy. There servers are located in Germany and Finland.

  11. 2

    Azure. Makes your life pretty easy as a .NET developer. Worth the money usually.

    1. 1

      We also use smarterasp.net for more cost conscious customers using .Net.

  12. 2

    Been using Siteground for some time - usually for client projects. Right now I’m starting to use the built in hosting on the likes of Webflow, Carrd and recently Super.so - Although not sure if that’s hosting or just redirecting.

    Siteground for my virtual server - easy to host some smaller builds in one central place and reasonable prices - amazing support
    The others simply for their reliability

    1. 1

      Ah and of course a little bit of AWS for my sloooooow Saas build ;-)

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  13. 2

    Surprised no one's mentioned Linode yet. They're one of the best VPS I've used! Great support and very competitive pricing.

  14. 1

    Vultr all the way. I host dozens of projects across their servers.

    For power users they have bring-your-own image, and they let you make and keep snapshots of existing and retired servers for no charge. I love that I can snapshot a server hosting a project and pick it up again at any time without cost or reinstall.

  15. 1

    I use google cloud for my production site & Contabo for development env

  16. 1

    Google firebase is our preferred hosting for serverless applications. Azure for .Net APIs and DO for everything else.

  17. 1

    I've seen many are using DigitalOcean, I am using it too.. and I am glad to, never had any problem with it, it's fast, easier than other servers (AWS for example), and great documentation

  18. 1

    I use digital ocean. Use them as they were well priced and easy to understand pricing unlike AWS. I used to use linode for similar reasons, but I hit an issue with them a while ago and then later.on found they couldn't support SSL load balancers with virtual hosts in Apache which digital ocean could, although not 100% sure but I think linode recently implemented that as well.

  19. 1

    Linode, they have a lot of good tutorials and the pricing is good.

  20. 1

    Digital Ocean now since I like the pricing and design (UX).

    I would avoid AWS, Google, and Azure clouds like a plague for a side project, because the pricing is not transparent and can break you.

  21. 1

    DigitalOcean for any self-hosted application otherwise Vercel + Firebase.

  22. 1

    I used to be on LiquidWeb for a long time (~8-10 years). I chose them mainly because their customer support was badass! They'd really go out of the way to help their clients and I relied on them for all my server troubleshooting.

    Over the time, I learned a lot of things about server administration. AWS offered us a few thousand bucks in credits; and I switched to them.

    AWS was bit difficult to learn initially; however, I never had any complaints about them. The servers were fast and I could easily connect different services (Redis, DB, Search) easily. It did require a bit of learning every time.

    After my AWS credits expired; I received free 1-year hosting from DigitalOcean and I've been with them ever since.

    What I like the most about them is that their servers are cheap, yet very fast. Over the time, my hosting needs have reduced. I now run everything off 1 server - and that keeps my headaches away.

    DigitalOcean is good and I look forward to continuing with them.

  23. 1

    I use vercel for all my projects..bcoz it's free

  24. 1

    I've got a few projects in AWS:

    • Static hosting: S3, Cloudfront
    • Laravel APIs: Elastic Beanstalk, Aurora DB
    • WordPress: Elastic Beanstalk, MySQL
    • Serverless API: Lambda / API Gateway, DynamoDB

    DigitalOcean I still have some legacy WordPress sites on.

    I use Google Cloud Platform for Big Query, processing some Business Intelligence/data stuff.

    Generally, I've stayed pretty close to AWS because I had to use it pretty heavily in my past jobs so I was able to pick it up. Now that I'm quite comfortable with it, it's just natural for me to keep using it for my freelancing and my personal projects. The pricing is generally really cheap, I pay pretty much $0 for all the static hosting.

  25. 1

    Digital ocean as well. Convenient and flexible to use.

  26. 1

    Everything I can I do on cloudflare.
    Cloudflare workers for JS backend code, and Cloudflare workers sites for website hosting.
    It runs on the edge so you don't have to choose a region, and in addition you get their caching layer and key-value store.
    For $5 a month this is the best deal you can find.

    In one case that I had to have a transactional DB I used faunaDB behind it.

  27. 1

    Vercel. It's perfect for Next.js and easy to use. It just works.

  28. 1

    I’m a big fan of Digital Ocean. Much simpler than AWS with similar features and tools. I pair it with Laravel Forge and I’m able to deploy code quickly and at scale

  29. 1

    AWS, Since I got the credit.

  30. 1

    I'm using cloudways It is managed and I can host as many websites on one server for me server cost is 13$ per month as I'm using vultr high intensity server...
    You can use Digital Ocean 10$ server also..
    ⚡ Support is excellent...
    ⚡ No restrictions on websites on one server....
    ⚡ I like the dashboard easy to setup everything....

    1. 1

      Hi!
      I am in the proccess of deciding between just Vultr or Cloudways. My rationale ATM is that after initial setup and automation of updates, it's cheaper to saty with Vultr instead of the recurring additional bill for ClowdWays.

      The no restriction on number of websites on the server is actually a feature of the host.

      Could you please give me what advantages you see from personal experience apart from the dashboard?

      1. 1

        For me setting up everything is easy and I got 3 months free with "Woblogger" coupon I'm not to much techy person to setup everything even when I tried setup the ssl certificate on vultr independent hosting and it is to much complex for me. Other hand on cloudways it is just two click.. Then I want to access the files of my server so then I don't get any detailed documentation or any good tool I think the access is directly via website itself but with cloudways I got an username and i setup password and access it via Filezilla software so for me access to files on my server is easy with cloudways.

        You can also try 3days free on cloudways to explore yourself

  31. 1

    Digitalocean and free tier AWS.

    It's hard to beat digitalocean prices.

  32. 1

    Mixture of AWS, Heroku and https://contabo.de/
    Depends on the project :D

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