Maybe we need a thread of hosting providers we like and for what reasons. I personally like OVH, they are a very low level host (they rent you hardware of a large variety of ways) and the software you run on it, OS included, is all on you, backing up included (though they rent nice backup hardware too), which is just how I like it. Their support is of course low level hardware stuff but they have been quick for me the like twice I’ve asked them about something in over 10 years (and no big ‘down’ issues at all).
Plus I like that you rent your specs, including bandwidth, if you pay for the low 100mbits connection to the net then that’s what you get, always, no metering or restrictions on ‘amount’ or anything beyond that.
I have used quite a few but my favourite has always been dedicated servers (just look at companies that are closest to you/your users and within your budget).
I would love to have my own data-centre as I have often toyed with buying my own servers and co-locating, but cost-wise it’s not that far off just renting dedicated servers. Own data-centre would be awesome.
we used vultr in our current site, and since my employer gave me green lights to move to Phoenix, we’ll use fly.io. we only got 1 downtime (around 15min afair) around summer 2020 with vultr.
I use Hetzner. I especially like their price/performance ratio and stability (never had a downtime)
DigitalOcean, in comparison, is way more expensive than Hetzner and less reliable
For deployment, managing databases, backups and apps I use self-hosted PaaS dokku.com , which allows me to deploy projects in different languages using Heroku-alike buildpacks (but isn’t limited to that, according to docs)
In fairness that is not a fair comparison, because all hosting providers can suffer from hardware failure at any moment in time, and this is a fact without any exception.
It’s up to us to have an effective backup system for the servers we run, and one that’s different from the hosting provider.
Even the author of the post acknowledges that:
Think about this for a minute: what are you going to do when one of your servers would disappear right now? I hope you take away from this story that you should always backup your servers. A hardware failure can happen at any given moment. Do not solely rely on backups from your own provider. Take your own backups as well. Use tools like BackupPC, Bacula, or a service like SnapShooter.
For inexpensive hosting, I can advise you on the Hosting Provider hostzealot.com. The cost of Shared Hosting starts at 0.96 euros per month. Such hosting is quite enough to put your website there. Just pay attention to the fact that when you start to grow traffic, you will need powerful hosting because the hosting will not be able to withstand heavy loads. And you will need to add more RAM, cores, and memory.
So I only got the nice parts.