Re SSD disks, as someone who's using both Digital Ocean and Ramnode: For PostgreSQL on smallish data sets (5GB) doing Sphinx reindexes every few minutes Digital Ocean's I/O performance is much lower than Ramnode's KVM SSD instances. Disk benchmarks on the two gave me 5-10x in Ramnode's favor on small instances. Digital Ocean is still pretty decent for a budget provider and Ramnode has all the standard issues of a smaller hoster (and all the advantages), but if I/O performance is critical to you it might be worth taking into account. DO is much slicker, though.