
Best Alternative to DigitalOcean? - ghettosoak
I have been with DigitalOcean for about 5 years now. I have decided that I would like a new VPS provider. 5 years ago, Linode was the closest competitor, closing the gap with its&#x27; customer service, but losing out to the attractive price of its competitor.<p>However, I know that Google and Amazon offer competing services – which carry their own implicit standards – but I guess I’d like to give my money to a ‘smaller’ competitor where possible?<p>Ultimately: I need a VPS that I can run a current version of Ubuntu on. Whereupon I can run PHP, MySQL, Node.js and its respective trimmings. Something I can play around with, but something that I can ship code and run my various products on.<p>Customer support is a significant selling point. So too is ease-of-use, and functionality of updates.<p>I&#x27;m willing to consider an increase in monthly price. I currently pay USD 5 per month.<p>As an American, I like the idea of my server running somewhere near home. As an expat living in Switzerland, I do have a certain partiality to Swiss products.<p>Any experience &#x2F; suggestion is welcome. Help!
======
codegeek
You can look at [https://vultr.com](https://vultr.com)

I use both vultr and DO and they are very comparable. Vultr customer service
has been decent and their pricing is competitive.

~~~
whb07
I like them as well. Some locations offer even a $5 instance/month. Very
responsive and intuitive UI as well.

~~~
BartBoch
I think 2 locations (NJ and Florida?) have $2,5 servers also. Support is worse
to what it was (I think it is outsourced, at least some of it), but still ok-
ish.

------
cdvonstinkpot
$5/month is rather minimal, IMO. I was happy with Prgmr @ their $20/month
service level.

Customer service is supposedly minimal with them, in accordance with their
motto: "We don't assume you are stupid", but were helpful the few times I
needed it. A bit slow maybe, but problem solved well within a week. (Turns out
Rsync.net's ssh console has limited bash commands available, so Prgmr's wiki
instructions to dd my disk there didn't work)

[https://billing.prgmr.com/index.php/order/main/packages/xen/...](https://billing.prgmr.com/index.php/order/main/packages/xen/?group_id=10)

------
croo
[https://www.ramnode.com/](https://www.ramnode.com/)

I had a small vpn for 2 years with zero downtime. Cheap too. Servers are in
the Netherlands and several places in the USA.

~~~
givehimagun
Man - I don't know if they are a small company or a large corporation...but
I've been with them for 5 years and I can't remember a single time it was
slow/had problems/flickered a monitor/anything.

It was rock solid when I was learning Chef and provisioning 5-7 small servers
on/off to learn how devops and microservices would work. I remember $1/month
instances ($3/quarter).

------
kull
What is the main reason of moving away from DO? We are using them for the last
few years and it’s a great ride.

~~~
akulbe
I was wondering the same thing myself. Digital Ocean had been great for me.

~~~
RantyDave
Well, sounds like support is a big issue. I'm a bit ... well, what do you
expect for $5/month?

~~~
kull
So disagree. Their support is 24/7, we had an issue (later turned being our
mistake), their tech support was working with us overnight. Yes, it was via
email, but who cares? I would not sit with them on the phone 8 hours as we
were troubleshooting. Our DO bill is $1k/mo, not sure if this impacts their
response time. But on the other hand, I myself run a larger SAAS, and you are
just not able to help everybody fast enough, you need to prioritize and you
prioritize enterprise clients.

------
DeepYogurt
I'm a fan of linode myself.

------
vkraskov
Given no reason and the language looks more like some kind of a market
survey..

------
tedmiston
Your requirements are pretty generic, and are met by every cloud provider. You
have some choices to make in terms of whether you want more of a PaaS (Elastic
Beanstalk, App Engine, Heroku) vs CaaS/IaaS approach (EC2).

That said, DO is something I still use and like today. What's your main
motivation for switching?

------
retrack
(Disclaimer: founder of Exoscale)

To address your partiality to Swiss products, check out Exoscale for a similar
(5$) simple experience with advanced features in Datacenters in Geneva,
Zurich, Vienna and Frankfurt.
[https://www.exoscale.com](https://www.exoscale.com)

------
slipwalker
Server4You ( despite negative reviews i have seen ) has served me well ( very
fair price for an unmetered 100Mbps link ) for over 5 years now. On the really
cheap VPS options, just make sure to have your services running under a
supervisor-daemon ( i use monit ) to preserve your sleep.

------
book_mentioned
Show HN: VPS Comparison – Automated tests to compare VPS by yourself |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538)

------
veddox
Strato? It's not exactly what you would call a "small" competitor, but its
servers are in Germany and it's subject to German security and privacy
regulations (which I consider a big bonus).

------
brewpackage
I think you should use Vultr, There's good interface as same as DigitalOcean,
and pricing is more flexible. And about speed, Vultr has good internet speed.

------
bobxyz
I'm used to Transip.eu, very good product, very good services.

[https://www.transip.eu/](https://www.transip.eu/)

------
sabarasaba
A bit offtopic, but whats the reason you would like to move away from them? I
just created a dropplet for a nextcloud server and the experience was painless

------
billconan
I will try upcloud next. Heard it’s the fastest.

------
shanecleveland
I'm pretty happy with webfaction.com. Been using them for many years. Easy and
continually upgrade plans and offerings.

~~~
shanecleveland
Right. Will occasionally see increases in space, memory, bandwidth, etc.,
within existing plans. They have also expanded offerings available.

------
sigjuice
My reason to give up Digital Ocean would be to get proper IPv6 support. Right
now, DO assigns you a /124 address.

------
jgowdy
I’ve had a good experience with SSD Nodes

------
theshank
Linode is awesome (and has a$5 plan too!)

~~~
BenjiWiebe
+1 for linode from me!

------
s3nnyy
Try appuio.ch that is a young Swiss PaaS.

~~~
st3fan
Looks interesting but they don’t seem to be targeting a non German speaking
market?

~~~
s3nnyy
[https://www.appuio.ch/en/index.html](https://www.appuio.ch/en/index.html)

------
neilwilson
[https://www.brightbox.com](https://www.brightbox.com)

Simple straightforward IaaS

~~~
st3fan
I would personally never host anything in the UK with their bizarre dragnet
laws.

------
marcusfrex
Transip.eu is solid. I have been working with them since 2014. And i have (and
still) used Linode and DO too.

~~~
bobxyz
Yes, transip.eu is good services !

------
mechris
I just moved from DO to OVH. More for less, and an Arch image...

------
znpy
Hetzner? Online.net/Scaleway?

~~~
justinclift
As a data point, Scaleway's responsiveness to things doesn't seem all that
great.

Saying that as a new-ish (only a few months) user to them.

For example, their CentOS 7 ARM7 images come with a bug that stops yum from
updating correctly.

This is a simple PR to fix the problem, yet hasn't even been looked at in the
month since it was created:

[https://github.com/scaleway/image-
centos/pull/26](https://github.com/scaleway/image-centos/pull/26)

That aside though, the hardware/software/capabilities seem pretty decent. And
(for me) the fix is automatically applied when servers are spun up so their
sluggish response doesn't negatively affect me.

~~~
jjeaff
I've used scaleway for a while for small projects. And lately, every single
instance size shows out of stock. I shut down and instance and couldn't start
it back up due to their being no available instances. Not exactly confidence
inspiring.

~~~
justinclift
They seem to be out of instances/space in their Amsterdam data centre whenever
I've looked over the last few weeks.

Their Paris data centre though generally seems to have a few instances spare
of things. Not sure if you checked both locations? :)

------
liveoneggs
joyent

