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Ask HN: What are good hosting providers?
33 points by joanna_ on July 26, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 52 comments
I am launching a small business. I do not have much budget. I cannot spend more than $5 per month.

I am going to host my web app on digitalocean. Is digitalocean right choice?

What is your experience with hosting providers?

Who is the best for low budget?




It depends on your needs really. DO is fine for low budget projects. Just below them I would suggest Vultr. If you don't care about API's and that sort of thing, then Ramnode is even cheaper, but I've had issues with the user interface.

There are a bunch of aggregator sites that compare vps providers. Here are two of them. [1] [2] [3]

Disclaimer: These sites can be a bit spammy. Use NoScript / uBlock. Also, you really do get what you pay for, so as your business grows, you may wish to consider diversifying across providers.

[1] - https://lowendbox.com/

[2] - https://vpscomp.com/servers

[3] - https://www.serverhunter.com as mentioned by IronBacon, I totally forgot about this one.


>lowendbox.com

Love it, but not sure that's a wise suggestion for someone clearly new to it all.


The aggregator sites are certainly spammy and take time to get used to. I primarily linked them as a list of VPS providers, prices, etc.. One can always go directly to the VPS main site.


Ramnode also has at times outright hostile customer support and a blatant disregard for customer privacy. Strongly advise against them.


They are for sure the bottom of the barrel. I threw that one in there because they have dirt cheap options.


Also https://www.serverhunter.com


What framework/programming language are you planning to use?

If you want super cheap, nothing will beat shared hosting. In most cases, you will have to write your coded in PHP and MySQL. You can get spaces really cheap hosting like 12 USD per year.

For any other framework, you have to use a VPS. Even in VPS there are two types - KVM based and LXC based. KVM based systems support docker but will be expensive. LXC based systems will be much cheaper but can run most frameworks.


I can personally recommend Vultr, Linode, and DO for reliable VPS services.

All of them have pretty competitive offerings, great support, and are just generally on top of things. You won't regret any of those hosts.

The problem with the hosts on lowendbox.com and the like is that they will very likely work, but they don't have the history for me to trust business critical tasks. Many are just resellers offering over-allocated machines.


I've been very happy with DigitalOcean but be aware that $5 is not going to get you very much. If it's a small web app or static site then the $5/mo droplet will be fine but plan to be spending more like $15 or $20/mo very soon.

Edit: If price is your biggest concern then maybe look at Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing) to get you started for less $.


I've also been quite happy with DigitalOcean for the last 2 years. Pricing is good, and I've had 0 downtime.


You didn't mention the type of business, so I'll throw out a question: do you need a VPS host? Is Wordpress hosting enough? Static site hosting? You said web app, but I just want to double check.

If you have to have a VPS where you get a bare OS and need to install your custom web app, there are some great suggestions already in here. I personally use DigitalOcean because my company's budget is super small as well.

If you just need a business website, there are cheaper options than DigitalOcean or Vultr.


I am using Vultr. They have very cheap VPS options and they have many different OS images i.e. I am running a CentOS and a OpenBSD instances.


I’m so glad someone mentioned Vultr. They are way underrated.

They have a phenomenal service. Hard to beat their pure raw performance (NVMe, high clock CPU), they offer a host of solution from dedicated to VPS, you truly can’t beat their price (I migrated from AWS to Vultr, Vultr was 8x cheaper for the comparable AWS offering), they have global presence.


The also offer money for writing guides for them.


Do you have a link for that? Checked their site just now (on mobile though), did not see a relevant link.


I think DigitalOcean offers it as well.


The cheapest VPS on Vultr doesn't provided IPv6. Does it mean people from IPv4 wont be able to access website hosted on that VPS? Is there a way around this issue?


If you're talking about the $2.50 VPS, yes, that's IPV6-only, so it doesn't support IPV4. You're correct that people who only use IPV4 won't be able to access that VPS, at least not without jumping through hoops. There's also a $3.50 VPS instance with the same spec that appears to support both IPV4 & IPV6.

I've been using Vultr for a while and am quite happy with them. I've also used a couple of the IPV6-only VPSs for experiments, but I have IPV4 & IPV6 connectivity at home.


Thank you. I did not know that. It is only available from their NY location. One has to click though all server locations to find the best deal for the need.


You would have to get another instance with IP4 support and reverse proxy to the IP6 one. Could be useful if you were using the IP6 box for something like a database server, but the instance you are talking about isn't really powerful enough for that.


I honestly don't know I am not a network guy. I am using IPv4 it seems on my site.


If you are targeting Europe, you could give Hetzner a shot. Starting at 2,50€/Month with 2GB RAM, 20GB NVMe and 1 CPU Core.

As of my knowledge, the ping isn´t that bad in the US neither.


Whenever I need a managed hosting provider (admittedly pretty rare, I run most of my personal stuff off a Digital Ocean VPS, but I'm also very comfortable with linux/ops/security and don't mind managing these things myself), I always head to https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ - these days they support a pretty varied collection of languages/frameworks, and they have a good combo of extremely transparent pricing, solid reliability, nice security features, and seemingly strong technical background.


I've had good experiences with them as well.


I have used these in production:

0. https://www.bytemark.co.uk/prices/#cloud-prices

1. https://www.pair.com/solutions/shared/ (FreeBSD-based)

2. https://www.linode.com/pricing

3. https://aws.amazon.com/free (Free Tier is awesome, for a little while)

Others I would evaluate:

4. https://www.digitalocean.com

5. https://www.orangewebsite.com (Iceland-based)

6. https://www.bahnhof.net (Sweden-based)

7. https://tranquillity.se (Sweden-based, green-powered and straightforward billing)

8. https://advania.com (Sweden-, Iceland-, Norway- and Finland-based)


Is it for a website or webapp?

If it is just a website, I highly recommend Netlify. It does static site hosting for dirt cheap.

If you need a webapp, I would agree with many other posters and say DO. They are the biggest of the "small" cloud providers, DO, Vultr, Linode. They have a wide range of options if you ever need to expand. I can't speak on their customer support because I have never had to use them.


You can't go wrong with DO for $5/mo.


I don’t see anyone mentioning AWS Lightsail.

https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/

I use it and it seems to be pretty great. I also like that it brings you into the AWS ecosystem at a low price, so if you need to scale or you want to make a bigger application, AWS is right there to hook into. Furthermore it’s a really simple UI and not as overwhelming as the normal AWS web console.


I have also had good experiences with Lightsail. We use the Tokyo node for an app targeting China. And unlike the Amazon free tier (older Red Hat) you get a choice of modern distributions.


Linode is great for cheap VPS. Most people here use DigitalOcean, but I did the comparison and liked Linode. Management console is pretty good (though I haven't tried their new one). The one serious benefit over DO is faster transfer (40gbps down/1 up). Not huge, but that's why I picked it.

I like the look of vultr, and have considered it, but their plans are functionally identical these days and I probably won't bother switching.


AWS and GCP have free tier options that you can benefit from. Having either as part of your skillset is good for a career in technology, so bonus points there.


I moved from DO to Scaleway a few years ago and I am super satisfied. Never had any problems whatsoever and I haven't found a cheaper hosting. Their console is easy to use and their offering is generally pretty good. Highly recommended.

I spend $3.33 (2.99€) and host a few apps. None big but they all run smooth as butter. It's amazing how much you can actually host on this little machines.


Worth pointing out that Scaleway only has servers in Europe. Paris and Amsterdam to be specific.

I'm American, but I've been using Scaleway for a few months, and latency aside, I've had zero problems as well and they're one of the only hosting providers I'm aware of that has ARM64 based VPS. Amazon recently announced ARM EC2 instances, but even their cheapest offering is weaker and significantly more expensive than Scaleways.


I've had excellent experience on DO for over 4 years now. Almost 0 downtime. DO is awesome!

Here are some that are not so great: ServerPronto

Here is one that nearly ruined my entire business: Rimuhosting (there was an actual hardware issue with the VPS and every 5 requests, the server would go down and they couldn't fix it, it was really awful.)


I'm surprised nobody mentioned joshtronic's VPS showdown:

https://joshtronic.com/2019/07/01/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...


Thanks, this was a great writeup with lots of benchmarks.


I haven’t seen any plugs yet for AWS Lighthouse. It’s in a dedicated UI, so it’s not as overwhelming as AWS. You don’t need Ground Control satellite services to run a website.

Lighthouse starts at $5/Mo and comes with great docs and lots of templates. It’s pretty comparable to a Digital Ocean droplet.


I think you meant Lightsail not Lighthouse correct?


Oops, correct. Its too late to edit :/


Oh whale. It's actually a fantastic suggestion. I think I'm actually going to use it based on the pricing and offering. Thanks for bringing it up.


Linode is good.

DigitalOcean is fine, too. I find some of their distro tooling to have annoying and longstanding bugs that never get fixed, though. I eventually moved all my servers back to Linode to avoid the small pointless hassles.

They're all probably more or less equal.


I suggest you spend some time reading the following thread before making a decision about Digital Ocean:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169


Been on Linode for about 6 years with nearly 0 downtime across 5 servers. Absolutely no complaints.

They did get hit with a nasty DDoS attack a couple years back which did suck for me, but it was short lived and I think it taught but them and me a lot..


If you're willing to learn - consider a google cloud VM.

It allows you to run a VM 24/7 for free indefinitely. Obvious not the most powerful machine but you can host a couple low activity sites on it no sweat.

>Is digitalocean right choice?

It's a good choice.


Anyone here used WPEngine for Wordpress hosting? https://wpengine.com


I’ve moved many people to it and more people away from it. It isn’t worth the cost for most people.


I like scaleway! Small, cheap, on baremetal.


Vultr is excellent. Especially for customized Linux distros and unique options like OpenBSD. As well as Linode.


Between Lightsail, Hetzner, Vultr and OVH - which one is better in Europe?


Hetzner and OVH should be the Same from a Network Point.

Personally I like Hetzner the most. They are dirty cheap and have a good support.


If you are willing to do the heavy lifting on the backend, nothing beats nearlyfreespeech


mddhosting.com




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