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Best Alternative to DigitalOcean?
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!
- s3nnyy 9y agoTry appuio.ch that is a young Swiss PaaS.
- znpy 9y agoHetzner? Online.net/Scaleway?
- justinclift 9y agoAs 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 9y agoI'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 9y agoThey 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? :)
- trillic 9y agoI love Scaleway's offerings but their lack of diversity in DC locations leaves a lot to be desired.
- sabarasaba 9y agoA 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
- tedmiston 9y agoYour 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?
- codegeek 9y agoYou 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.
- DeepYogurt 9y agoI'm a fan of linode myself.
- marcusfrex 9y agoTransip.eu is solid. I have been working with them since 2014. And i have (and still) used Linode and DO too.
- bobxyz 9y agoYes, transip.eu is good services !
- neilwilson 9y agohttps://www.brightbox.com https://www.brightbox.com Simple straightforward IaaS
- st3fan 9y agoI would personally never host anything in the UK with their bizarre dragnet laws.
- billconan 9y agoI will try upcloud next. Heard it’s the fastest.
- kull 9y agoWhat 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 9y agoI was wondering the same thing myself. Digital Ocean had been great for me.
- RantyDave 9y agoWell, sounds like support is a big issue. I'm a bit ... well, what do you expect for $5/month?
- kull 9y agoSo 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- liveoneggs 9y agojoyent
- theshank 9y agoLinode is awesome (and has a$5 plan too!)
- BenjiWiebe 9y ago+1 for linode from me!
- jgowdy 9y agoI’ve had a good experience with SSD Nodes
- mechris 9y agoI just moved from DO to OVH. More for less, and an Arch image...
- vkraskov 9y agoGiven no reason and the language looks more like some kind of a market survey..
- cdvonstinkpot 9y 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/?group_id=10 https://billing.prgmr.com/index.php/order/main/packages/xen/...
- croo 9y agohttps://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 9y agoMan - 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 ($3/quarter).
- bobxyz 9y agoI'm used to Transip.eu, very good product, very good services. https://www.transip.eu/ https://www.transip.eu/
- shanecleveland 9y agoI'm pretty happy with webfaction.com. Been using them for many years. Easy and continually upgrade plans and offerings.
- vram22 9y agoBy upgrade, do you mean they offer more features or resources later, for the same price for which you were getting less of the same, earlier?
- shanecleveland 9y agoRight. Will occasionally see increases in space, memory, bandwidth, etc., within existing plans. They have also expanded offerings available.
- sigjuice 9y agoMy reason to give up Digital Ocean would be to get proper IPv6 support. Right now, DO assigns you a /124 address.
- book_mentioned 9y agoShow HN: VPS Comparison – Automated tests to compare VPS by yourself | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245538
- brewpackage 9y agoI think you should use Vultr, There's good interface as same as DigitalOcean, and pricing is more flexible. And about speed, Vultr has good internet speed.
- veddox 9y agoStrato? It's not exactly what you would call a "small" competitor, but its servers are in Germany and it's subject to German security and privacy regulations (which I consider a big bonus).
- slipwalker 9y agoServer4You ( despite negative reviews i have seen ) has served me well ( very fair price for an unmetered 100Mbps link ) for over 5 years now. On the really cheap VPS options, just make sure to have your services running under a supervisor-daemon ( i use monit ) to preserve your sleep.
- retrack 9y ago(Disclaimer: founder of Exoscale) To address your partiality to Swiss products, check out Exoscale for a similar (5$) simple experience with advanced features in Datacenters in Geneva, Zurich, Vienna and Frankfurt. https://www.exoscale.com https://www.exoscale.com