Ask HN: What are good hosting providers? 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? |
Personally I like Hetzner the most. They are dirty cheap and have a good support.
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.
Love it, but not sure that's a wise suggestion for someone clearly new to it all.
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.
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.
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 $.
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.
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.
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.
As of my knowledge, the ping isn´t that bad in the US neither.
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)
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.
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 like the look of vultr, and have considered it, but their plans are functionally identical these days and I probably won't bother switching.
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.
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.
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.)
https://joshtronic.com/2019/07/01/vps-showdown-digitalocean-...
Lighthouse starts at $5/Mo and comes with great docs and lots of templates. It’s pretty comparable to a Digital Ocean droplet.
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.
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..
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.