Some years ago, there was not a lot of possibilities when choosing a web host. All of them are old and rusty companies that where nice when the industry started, but they never refreshed themselves afterward. They mostly have "stockimages kinda website design" with an integration of CPanel for you to use, and that's it. Just pay and don't write to our customer service please.
But now there is a company raising the bar up high, it's called Digital Ocean (you'll earn 10$ in free credits if you signup with that link by the way). It's by far, the best experience with web hosting I ever had. And it has to be one of the best experience with any internet service too.
Simplicity
Just check how easy it is to create a new web server (called droplets) :
There is a lot of pre-configured droplets you can just pick and use (wordpress, nodejs, mongodb, drupal, docker, etc.). It only takes seconds and you have an IP address you can SSH to with your already authorized SSH key !
How easy and pleasant is that ?
Rapidity
Every droplets are SSD based (solid-state-drives), offering the fastest possible response and reducing the bottleneck of physically reading a traditional hard-drive.
They also have fast Tier-1 bandwidth, and redundant 40G hypervisor connections.
Flexibility
The price for their servers ranges from 5 to 1680 $ per month. It's very easy to just launch a prototype or a small project on a 5$ droplet and scale up later with, again, the simplicity of a click on a button on their web interface !
The best part is they charge you per hours instead of per months (you pay monthly, but the cost is hourly based), this means you could have yourself the most badass server for 2 hours, and only pay for those 2 hours of use.
That's amazing to me. It's very realistic and respectful of the customer, It doesn't follow the shitty marketing way of "buy this for 5 years and save a lot of money in the end!", it's more aligned with what the customer needs, I really like that.
Improvements
Digital Ocean is constantly improving their service and offering new products for you to use like block storage, load balancers, monitoring, REST API, etc.
Conclusion
It's a very pleasant to use service that is sharp and on point. You won't be disappointed now or in the future neither because Digital Ocean is a company heading toward the good direction. It should stick and be still relevant for a long while.
Go on, jump aboard !
