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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>Customer support is a significant selling point. So too is ease-of-use, and functionality of updates.<p>I'm willing to consider an increase in monthly price. I currently pay USD 5 per month.<p>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.<p>Any experience / suggestion is welcome. Help!
You can look at <a href="https://vultr.com" rel="nofollow">https://vultr.com</a><p>I use both vultr and DO and they are very comparable. Vultr customer service has been decent and their pricing is competitive.
$5/month is rather minimal, IMO. I was happy with Prgmr @ their $20/month service level.<p>Customer service is supposedly minimal with them, in accordance with their motto: "We don't assume you are stupid", but were helpful the few times I needed it. A bit slow maybe, but problem solved well within a week. (Turns out Rsync.net's ssh console has limited bash commands available, so Prgmr's wiki instructions to dd my disk there didn't work)<p><a href="https://billing.prgmr.com/index.php/order/main/packages/xen/?group_id=10" rel="nofollow">https://billing.prgmr.com/index.php/order/main/packages/xen/...</a>
<a href="https://www.ramnode.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ramnode.com/</a><p>I had a small vpn for 2 years with zero downtime. Cheap too. Servers are in the Netherlands and several places in the USA.
Your requirements are pretty generic, and are met by every cloud provider. You have some choices to make in terms of whether you want more of a PaaS (Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine, Heroku) vs CaaS/IaaS approach (EC2).<p>That said, DO is something I still use and like today. What's your main motivation for switching?
(Disclaimer: founder of Exoscale)<p>To address your partiality to Swiss products, check out Exoscale for a similar (5$) simple experience with advanced features in Datacenters in Geneva, Zurich, Vienna and Frankfurt. <a href="https://www.exoscale.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.exoscale.com</a>
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.
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).
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.
I'm used to Transip.eu, very good product, very good services.<p><a href="https://www.transip.eu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.transip.eu/</a>
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