What Hosting do you use?

Digital Ocean and Linode are my go-to's. Same price points and both have excellent documentation / guides / tutorials. If you're looking to mess around with an unmanaged server you'll be just fine with a $10/mo plan, probably even a $5/mo plan.

The good thing about these providers is you can spin up any number of VPS's you want and delete them whenever you want through a web interface. There's no need to wait for someone to build your instance for you. You can deploy a VPS on Digital Ocean in less than a minute and delete it just as fast if you mess something up. You can start over as many times as you need -- it's 100% self service. At $0.015/hr why would you not go this route especially when you can learn something along the way?
 
I would like to know what hosting company everyone is using, and what kind /size/cost of package they are on.
For my forums at https://community.centminmod.com/ been using Linode 8GB 4CPU KVM VPS plan running my Centmin Mod LEMP stack with Nginx + PHP 7 (with PGO enabled) PHP-FPM + MariaDB MySQL since almost the start of the forum in 2014 so 5yrs this month :D 😎 Ample resources, only went with higher Linode plan for disk space but extra memory is very useful for various cache implementations across the server :)

Cost is US$40 + US$10 (enabled backups) = US$50/month for Linode US West Coast datacenter hosting (my ideal location right in middle between Asia and Europe) :)
 
So if I would save $40 per month by switching, and my time is worth $40, would it be worth it?
Well, in the case of my forum, it was. Basically because with a managed hoster, I had too many restrictions and choices foisted upon me that crimped what I could do with my forum. For example, being able to install ImageMagick, or Elasticsearch, or getting close to the limitations on inode count, or database size restriction......or wanting to run a more current version of php or apache than a managed hoster allows. Or file upload size restrictions for images.

Again, it's all in what you want and need. I find that it's a lot of work up front to set things up, but not much more than with a managed host to actually keep things running on an ongoing basis. Run the OS system patch once a week or so to get the latest files, and so forth.

The cpanel or Plesk interfaces that many hosters use are decent and probably good enough for 90% of users. I have found that actually having to DO things myself, is not only educational but helpful in building new skills. I've enjoyed the process of setting up things myself and managing them, but I realize it's not for everyone.

Bottom line -- you gotta do what's right for you. Time is money for some folks. For others who want to give their users the best possible experience, may be best to do a VPS. No one way is correct.


P.S. By the way, any "name brand" hoster such as Bluehost, 1&1, GoDaddy and others .... you get what you pay for. Service is crap and any "support" is typically via chat from some unknown character in India. Often takes days to get stuff resolved. With Linode I deal with real people here in the US, and all issues get taken care of within a few hours, if not minutes.
 
I use Digital Ocean, 2vCPU/4Gb plan for my site with a dedicated block storage for all /data and /internal_data. Running Litespeed w/MariaDB. Very similar to KH and Linode specs and pricing but of course it's all unmanaged so you have to know what you're doing.

what would you guys want to see in a hosting package that maybe you usually dont?
Apart from just a regular vps instance, ideally options for content spaces, CDN, load balancers, dedicated backends for DB, private networking, kubernetes clusters. All things I don't use for my own site but they're all there if needed :) At minimum the ability to extend SSD storage or attach block/space storage.
 
Container hosting (containerized "shared" server) @ Antagonist (Netherlands).
  • 1 core CPU
  • 1024 MB RAM
  • Unlimited SSD Storage (fair use policy)
  • Unlimited data transfer
  • Redis cache (128 MB)
  • DMARK
  • DomainKeys Identified Mail
  • auto back-up (Files and db)
€170,40/year (€14,20/month)

 
@WSWD http://www.wswd.net

I've been very happy with them since switching from my previous host :)

I'm only on the bronze shared hosting package at the minute, but will be more than happy to upgrade as necessary.

I didn't see the need to go for VPS until my site grows considerably.
 
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Hostgator. Reseller account, I think the smallest plan (30 bucks/month). Not 100% pleased with them, but, after 15 years of doing business with this company I still like their services. Overall good.
 
Hetzner. Don't think anyone can beat them for unmanaged. Probably the best EU company. (Prices shown are without VAT though)

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And if you need more disk space, you pay extra 4€/100GB. You can scale up your storage with any plan however you want (0.4€/10GB).

We are @Hetzner too. But on a Rootserver with PleskOnyx30 Domains and (32GB Ram, AMD 8CoreCpu 256GB SSD unlimited traffic..200GB Backup /29 IPv4 Net /64 IPv6.)
Cost round about 100€/Month
Localhost is my Castle. ;)
 
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