ooh, fun thread i completely missed
I've never actually selfhosted, in the past my IP would change too often and nowadays while my "dynamic" IP is static for years on end, I still never found that it made sense for me. So I can only really share stories with hosting providers, but at the least I do have a good bit of experience with those by now as part of my day job. Though, that's not where I started; my first project that needed hosting (a mIRC bot) I rented a small Windows Server box from someone in the community the bot ran in. When I pivoted (around 2013?) to web development, my first websites were just on GitHub Pages... but from there I did get my first VPS, a DigitalOcean droplet.
DigitalOcean was still very new at the time and above all very cheap, offering a more modern "cloud" model where they assume you don't actually use the full hardware and underprovision for what they sell. While this is bad for any high-performance applications obviously that wasn't a problem for me back then and still isn't a problem for me most of the time now. Since I've spent the most time with them, I also have had more than enough little run-ins with them, mainly them suddenly requiring my ID and the such for no explicable reason, as well as a good few outages. That said, DigitalOcean has always been quite reliable for me, I don't think they're ever a bad choice. They're just far surpassed by other providers nowadays in my opinion, and I only use them for cases where I either need them as an alternative or when I've already committed to using them, for example my main personal VPS and my mailserver are with them because it's too much hassle to move :^)
For my day job I've had to explore many different alternatives however; the first thing I decided on was that I needed a dedicated server, not a VPS — while this is a problem especially with DO, all VPSes have the chance of noisy neighbors, where others on the same machine are all running heavy tasks and your machine gets choked out by them, because the machines are underprovisioned for their tenants. I first went with SoYouStart, a cheaper division of OVH. In all honesty, while they served me well, I won't say they were particularly good, but I suppose that's what you get for the price. In particular, you get consumer hardware, which means no hardware-level VNC (so you can't manually install an OS), alongside no ECC and worse networking. The bad networking in particular caused a good few outages in the time I was with SYS, and the lack of ECC is what ended up making me leave — I had a terrifying experience of a RAM stick dying on the production server, where I was very lucky that nothing ended up getting corrupted despite malformed commands being sent to the database and the such. On the other hand, SYS has a phone line you can call, which is a very welcome thing to have in the case of any emergency.
After SYS, I went to who is now my go-to, Vultr. They're actually moderately cheaper than DigitalOcean now (mostly due to price hikes on DO's end), but in general they feel a bit more professional and more focused on their core offerings, as opposed to DO who is off in another universe creating AI container swarm k8s object storage tesseract terraform hellscapes that I am too dumb to understand. I use both their dedicated server offerings, which have been very stable for me, and operate a bunch of smaller VPSes with them too for routing. Vultr doesn't have a phone line, but their support ticket system will generally net you a well-thought-out response within five minutes, which I think is formidable.
Beyond Vultr, I also used some other VPS providers for in case some of Vultr's network backbone (mostly NTT-GIS) goes down (which is very often when it comes to the korea↔netherlands link grrrrrrrrrr), nowadays just LightNode (who are fine, not cheap, but fine) but I've also been with KDATACENTER who are absolute scammers (randomly disabled my VPSes telling me that there was a DDoS (which is totally possible! but they didn't give any proof) and that in order to restore access I had to pay like 200$/mo extra for a protection plan, holding the data on the servers hostage until then. Luckily these servers I had with them are basically stateless so I just gave them the middle finger and went to LightNode :^)
So in general for anyone looking for a VPS or Dedi, I'd personally recommend Vultr first, my main reasoning being that they're well-focused on the product offering that you're looking for there, which IMO is important for a business, to not lose sight of its core business
As for domain providers, grrrrrr
grrrrrr grumble grumble grumble I Have Many Annoyances With GoDaddy Grrrrrrrr
In general, I've been with Namecheap for everything. They're cheap and they're good, their service is good and fast, their DNS isn't the fastest but realistically that's fine. GoDaddy on the other hand will try their hardest to piss you off even when you purposefully stay as far away from them as possible.
One of my first domains was with GoDaddy actually, because I bought it from someone who was with them. Despite checking every single option to not renew, they still renewed it 30 days after expiry without my consent despite sending 10+ "you're domain expire's soon!!!" emails. They did refund this, so whatever, right?
I had a domain I wanted to buy, which was a "premium domain", which means that it was owned by a registrar or registry, in this case GoDaddy. Not knowing any better, I bought the domain... only for GoDaddy to just... not give it to me. They instead let it expire, to then put it up on a fake auction site with a starting bid of $2K. Fuck you too, then.
I had a domain with Namecheap, I still do, when I suddenly get an email "Get Ready to Transfer this domain out" claiming I had put up the domain on the AfterNIC marketplace (which is owned by GoDaddy). I never did so, but now it was suddenly listed there. I confirmed with both Namecheap and AfterNIC that it's impossible to put up a domain for sale without owning it, so someone must have bypassed the limitations. In addition, it was listed as a "premium" domain which implies it's owned by, you guessed it, GoDaddy. If I hadn't reacted fast, they might have just swiped the domain out from under me, without any right to do so. This has happened to people before on numerous occasions. So even if you're not using GoDaddy you aren't safe.
tl;dr fuck godaddy and kdatacenter, get ecc ram; vultr a goode
Self-hosting
I've never actually selfhosted, in the past my IP would change too often and nowadays while my "dynamic" IP is static for years on end, I still never found that it made sense for me. So I can only really share stories with hosting providers, but at the least I do have a good bit of experience with those by now as part of my day job. Though, that's not where I started; my first project that needed hosting (a mIRC bot) I rented a small Windows Server box from someone in the community the bot ran in. When I pivoted (around 2013?) to web development, my first websites were just on GitHub Pages... but from there I did get my first VPS, a DigitalOcean droplet.
VPSes and Dedis
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean was still very new at the time and above all very cheap, offering a more modern "cloud" model where they assume you don't actually use the full hardware and underprovision for what they sell. While this is bad for any high-performance applications obviously that wasn't a problem for me back then and still isn't a problem for me most of the time now. Since I've spent the most time with them, I also have had more than enough little run-ins with them, mainly them suddenly requiring my ID and the such for no explicable reason, as well as a good few outages. That said, DigitalOcean has always been quite reliable for me, I don't think they're ever a bad choice. They're just far surpassed by other providers nowadays in my opinion, and I only use them for cases where I either need them as an alternative or when I've already committed to using them, for example my main personal VPS and my mailserver are with them because it's too much hassle to move :^)
OVH/SoYouStart
For my day job I've had to explore many different alternatives however; the first thing I decided on was that I needed a dedicated server, not a VPS — while this is a problem especially with DO, all VPSes have the chance of noisy neighbors, where others on the same machine are all running heavy tasks and your machine gets choked out by them, because the machines are underprovisioned for their tenants. I first went with SoYouStart, a cheaper division of OVH. In all honesty, while they served me well, I won't say they were particularly good, but I suppose that's what you get for the price. In particular, you get consumer hardware, which means no hardware-level VNC (so you can't manually install an OS), alongside no ECC and worse networking. The bad networking in particular caused a good few outages in the time I was with SYS, and the lack of ECC is what ended up making me leave — I had a terrifying experience of a RAM stick dying on the production server, where I was very lucky that nothing ended up getting corrupted despite malformed commands being sent to the database and the such. On the other hand, SYS has a phone line you can call, which is a very welcome thing to have in the case of any emergency.
Vultr
After SYS, I went to who is now my go-to, Vultr. They're actually moderately cheaper than DigitalOcean now (mostly due to price hikes on DO's end), but in general they feel a bit more professional and more focused on their core offerings, as opposed to DO who is off in another universe creating AI container swarm k8s object storage tesseract terraform hellscapes that I am too dumb to understand. I use both their dedicated server offerings, which have been very stable for me, and operate a bunch of smaller VPSes with them too for routing. Vultr doesn't have a phone line, but their support ticket system will generally net you a well-thought-out response within five minutes, which I think is formidable.
the korea zone
Beyond Vultr, I also used some other VPS providers for in case some of Vultr's network backbone (mostly NTT-GIS) goes down (which is very often when it comes to the korea↔netherlands link grrrrrrrrrr), nowadays just LightNode (who are fine, not cheap, but fine) but I've also been with KDATACENTER who are absolute scammers (randomly disabled my VPSes telling me that there was a DDoS (which is totally possible! but they didn't give any proof) and that in order to restore access I had to pay like 200$/mo extra for a protection plan, holding the data on the servers hostage until then. Luckily these servers I had with them are basically stateless so I just gave them the middle finger and went to LightNode :^)
So in general for anyone looking for a VPS or Dedi, I'd personally recommend Vultr first, my main reasoning being that they're well-focused on the product offering that you're looking for there, which IMO is important for a business, to not lose sight of its core business
Domains, or "fuck godaddy"
As for domain providers, grrrrrr
grrrrrr grumble grumble grumble I Have Many Annoyances With GoDaddy Grrrrrrrr
In general, I've been with Namecheap for everything. They're cheap and they're good, their service is good and fast, their DNS isn't the fastest but realistically that's fine. GoDaddy on the other hand will try their hardest to piss you off even when you purposefully stay as far away from them as possible.
Exhibit A. when i was still with them
One of my first domains was with GoDaddy actually, because I bought it from someone who was with them. Despite checking every single option to not renew, they still renewed it 30 days after expiry without my consent despite sending 10+ "you're domain expire's soon!!!" emails. They did refund this, so whatever, right?
Exhibit B. premium domain shittery
I had a domain I wanted to buy, which was a "premium domain", which means that it was owned by a registrar or registry, in this case GoDaddy. Not knowing any better, I bought the domain... only for GoDaddy to just... not give it to me. They instead let it expire, to then put it up on a fake auction site with a starting bid of $2K. Fuck you too, then.
Exhibit C. trying to steal my domain
I had a domain with Namecheap, I still do, when I suddenly get an email "Get Ready to Transfer this domain out" claiming I had put up the domain on the AfterNIC marketplace (which is owned by GoDaddy). I never did so, but now it was suddenly listed there. I confirmed with both Namecheap and AfterNIC that it's impossible to put up a domain for sale without owning it, so someone must have bypassed the limitations. In addition, it was listed as a "premium" domain which implies it's owned by, you guessed it, GoDaddy. If I hadn't reacted fast, they might have just swiped the domain out from under me, without any right to do so. This has happened to people before on numerous occasions. So even if you're not using GoDaddy you aren't safe.
tl;dr fuck godaddy and kdatacenter, get ecc ram; vultr a goode
