What are your top 3 hosting providers?

[MrChris]

Whats your top 3 webhosting providers? If you are looking or want to share your top three.

1. crocweb
2. buyvm
3. Hawkhost

All of these have 2 things in common they have shared hosting and reseller as well as decent pricing.

 

[Arantor]

For me...

1. Kinsta - if you're hosting WordPress, I can't say enough good things about them. Not the cheapest, but solid in my experience.
2. Cloudways/Digital Ocean (specifically DO) - they're a managed hosting provider that can use Linode or Digital Ocean, where you get a somewhat managed setup on top of a regular affordable VPS, I find it's worth the extra to not have to manage at a lower level (though I can if I have to)
3. Will agree with Crocweb for a third place. Affordable, good support if there's a problem.

 

[MrChris]

For me...

1. Kinsta - if you're hosting WordPress, I can't say enough good things about them. Not the cheapest, but solid in my experience.
2. Cloudways/Digital Ocean (specifically DO) - they're a managed hosting provider that can use Linode or Digital Ocean, where you get a somewhat managed setup on top of a regular affordable VPS, I find it's worth the extra to not have to manage at a lower level (though I can if I have to)
3. Will agree with Crocweb for a third place. Affordable, good support if there's a problem.

I haven't heard of kinsta i will have to check them out. the others I have heard of there all around good providers.

 

[Tracy]

Don't used shared... only VPS or a dedicated (if I want to set up to configure my own VPS's).
Currently in order
Hetzner
Digital Ocean
LiNode
RAMNode (getting away from them since they sold out)

Transactional email is serviced by Amazon SES and bounce/unsubscribe features through ZoHo hosted domain related email.

 

[Arantor]

Mildly surprised you still recommend Linode after their price rises and drop in quality after buy-out from Akamai.

 

[Tracy]

Mildly surprised you still recommend Linode after their price rises and drop in quality after buy-out from Akamai.

One reason I still do is that I don't really expect their infrastructure/support to tank immediately. I don't use them, and didn't realize that they've bumped their prices up 20% after the buyout. That's a rather steep increase, but guess the "new bosses" feel they need to make up their expenditures quicker. 🐷
There are others that I personally will use also (Vultr being one), but they are more expensive since they are "smaller" in size. I really hated it when RamNode got bought out, although the couple of people I know that have VPS's are still fairly happy with their support and the hardware.
We have to all realize that there are going to be some price increases in todays economy, even amongst companies that have not been bought out. Electricity itself will cause some of that, as very few businesses are willing to "eat" additional costs when they've been feeding at a full table, they don't don't like to see the desserts removed.

 

[Arantor]

I don't really expect their infrastructure/support to tank immediately

Yeah but it pretty much did though. I walked away from Linode earlier this year after nearly 17 years of being a customer.

 

[Tracy]

Yeah but it pretty much did though. I walked away from Linode earlier this year after nearly 17 years of being a customer.

Honestly... in the years that I've been running a VPS, I can count on 1 hand the number of times I've had to contact the provider for support. In fact, I actually submitted more support tickets when I had the dedicated servers - but those were more for upgrades of memory or storage.
With their price increase alone it will be the main reason I'll quit recommending them as there are others in that price range that are of great quality.

 

[Arantor]

The price rise was a huge deal; in that 17 year span, I started with a $40 server way back in 2006 and got 160MB RAM for it, By the time I finally downgraded that same VPS to the $20 plan, it was an 8GB VPS and my price hadn't risen in that time. So they were kind of overdue a price rise but they'd always done right by the customer before and passed on their economies of scale as a free plan upgrade.

 

[Jordan]

2. Cloudways/Digital Ocean (specifically DO) - they're a managed hosting provider that can use Linode or Digital Ocean, where you get a somewhat managed setup on top of a regular affordable VPS, I find it's worth the extra to not have to manage at a lower level (though I can if I have to)

I had issues with cloudways. There were a lot of limitations back when I used them. Not sure if they have improved or not.

 

[Arantor]

Well, compared to a bare VPS, sure - but that's what a managed layer is, something to deal with things so I don't have to, and as part of that you lose some functionality so that the management layer can work correctly.

I haven't run into any limitations yet that have bothered me enough to look elsewhere, and the limitations I have encountered tended to be super specific to my situation so not a fault on Cloudways' part either.