For the fellow European (edit: & US) HN crowd I can highly recommend Hetzner's Cloud offerings: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
Contabo and Netcup are alternatives. Contabo has options in the UK/US/Singapore but is also German. Netcup is German, and I don't know where their servers are. OVH is another one but have had mixed experiences with their customer support.
DO prices are ridiculous (imo).
I get maintenance emails quite often, but I think it's from an abundance of caution. I can't remember it actually ever going down.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...
The key is to be ready to recover from failure. OVH had a fire, but disks, backups, network, power, etc, can (and do) fail on premium providers. While this may say something about OVH, the effect on you as a customer is essentially the same: downtime, data loss, etc.
My experience with OVH until that point was good. 4 years without problems. I had another VPS and one dedicated server - different datacenters to avoid the "all eggs in the same basket" problem - and they were fine. The dedi, for example, I kept it from early 2017 until 6 months ago when I moved to Hetzner (better hardware, same price) and never had any issues.
I understand that not everyone can or wants to do things this way, but sometimes the savings are huge and that allows you to have more redundancy or to save money. For example, one of my websites uses a bit of bandwidth... last time I checked, it would cost around 2k/mo to run it on AWS, but only ~90 euros/mo on OVH/Hetzner. I can have another 2 replicas/servers ready to go in case of a problem and still save money.
And it's not only servers. For example, I was using S3 to store backups. Now I backup to providers like Backblaze B2, Wasabi, etc, at the same time and still save money. When I had to restore the VPS lost in the fire, I did it from my Wasabi backups because they don't charge for egress (fair use). Overall I still pay less, have more copies in different datacenters and providers, and don't have to worry about the costs of restoring backups (at least not as much).
Terrible support. https://community.oracle.com/tech/apps-infra/discussion/4496...
This eliminated a whole bunch of apps. I real head scratcher.
Render.com works a lot better for me. The disk is symlinked in automatically to ‘/var/data’ and I can add it in with an environmental variable set in the dashboard.
I have no idea why digital ocean cripples its app offerings like this. If anyone works there see this please add disks to docker apps.
The only problem is that now those other comments made me consider Contabo...
I'm a bit sad they don't have anything closer to the UK: I'll miss the 4ms ping to my DO VPS.
EDIT: holy shit, I looked into Contabo mentioned below and it's even cheaper! €5 for 4 cores and 8 GB RAM, what's the catch?
It doesn't take into account though: - update guarantees - quality of customer support (I had very bad experiences with Scaleway for example) - score normalisation across many instances, to compensate different loads on VM hosts into account
No managed databases or kubernetes clusters though. Hoping that’s in the works as it will really level up their offering if they do.
Hetzner Cloud looks modern and it's easy to use. They don't have the same services as DO though.
If you go the dedicated server way, you'll use the old control panel. I don't find it hard to use, but it's not as good looking.
"You get you pay for", even if it is half true accounting for DO's shareholder's pressure, I think Hetzner is impossibly cheap.
Tbf though, Hetzner auctions with 6TB*2 of disk at 45EUR are a good alternative. It is really a trade-off between having a server with decent power or having the flexibility of scalable S3 storage.
I don't do transcodes though, and I think that is the other problem with a low-power system.
I use it for all my projects for 3 years, and very satisfied