Best Alternative to DigitalOcean?

29 points by ghettosoak 8 years ago | 42 comments

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' customer service, but losing out to the attractive price of its competitor.

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?

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.

Customer support is a significant selling point. So too is ease-of-use, and functionality of updates.

I'm willing to consider an increase in monthly price. I currently pay USD 5 per month.

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.

Any experience / suggestion is welcome. Help!

codegeek 8 years ago |

You can look at 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 8 years ago | |

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

BartBoch 8 years ago | | |

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 8 years ago |

$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/...

croo 8 years ago |

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 8 years ago | |

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 8 years ago |

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 8 years ago | |

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

RantyDave 8 years ago | | |

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

DeepYogurt 8 years ago |

I'm a fan of linode myself.

vkraskov 8 years ago |

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

tedmiston 8 years ago |

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 8 years ago |

(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

slipwalker 8 years ago |

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 8 years ago |

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

veddox 8 years ago |

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 8 years ago |

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 8 years ago |

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

https://www.transip.eu/

sabarasaba 8 years ago |

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 8 years ago |

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

shanecleveland 8 years ago |

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

shanecleveland 8 years ago | |

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

vram22 8 years ago | |

By upgrade, do you mean they offer more features or resources later, for the same price for which you were getting less of the same, earlier?

sigjuice 8 years ago |

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

jgowdy 8 years ago |

I’ve had a good experience with SSD Nodes

theshank 8 years ago |

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

BenjiWiebe 8 years ago | |

+1 for linode from me!

s3nnyy 8 years ago |

Try appuio.ch that is a young Swiss PaaS.

st3fan 8 years ago | |

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

s3nnyy 8 years ago | | |

https://www.appuio.ch/en/index.html

neilwilson 8 years ago |

https://www.brightbox.com

Simple straightforward IaaS

st3fan 8 years ago | |

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

marcusfrex 8 years ago |

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

bobxyz 8 years ago | |

Yes, transip.eu is good services !

mechris 8 years ago |

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

znpy 8 years ago |

Hetzner? Online.net/Scaleway?

justinclift 8 years ago | |

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

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 8 years ago | | |

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.

trillic 8 years ago | |

I love Scaleway's offerings but their lack of diversity in DC locations leaves a lot to be desired.

liveoneggs 8 years ago |

joyent