DigitalOcean

Coming from a non-web development environment background, I was a bit lost a first and bewildered by all the varying tools and platforms, and spent much too long evaluating before eventualy deciding on Laravel as the main core of my development.

But as I started development with Laravel that lead me into discovering Vue.js for creating beautiful front-end components that were easy to configure and extend, so I decided to standardise on Vue.js for most of my front-end development.

During my search for additional Vue.js components, a chance comment in a @laravel forum , led me to discover Quasar Framework initially for it's wide range of in-built components ... but once, I realised that Quasar Framework allowed me to use the same codebase to create apps for SPA, PWA, iOS, Android, and Electron then I was hooked.

So, I'm now using mainly just Quasar Framework for all the front-end, with Laravel providing a backend API service to the Front-end apps.

I'm deploying this all to DigitalOcean droplets via service called Moss.sh which deploys my private GitHub repositories directly to DigitalOcean in realtime.

I use DigitalOcean because of the simplicity of using their basic offerings, such as droplets. In AppAttack, we need low-level control of our infrastructure so we can rapidly deploy a custom training web application on-demand for each training session, and building a Kubernetes cluster on top of DigitalOcean droplets allowed us to do exactly that.

#CloudHosting

This week, we finally released NurseryPeople.com. In the end, I chose to provision our server on DigitalOcean. So far, I am SO happy with that decision. Although setting everything up was a challenge, and I learned a lot, DigitalOceans blogs helped in so many ways. I was able to set up nginx and the Laravel web app pretty smoothly. I am also using Buddy for deploying changes made in git, which is super awesome. All I have to do in order to deploy is push my code to my private repo, and buddy transfers everything over to DigitalOcean. So far, we haven't had any downtime and DigitalOceans prices are quite fair for the power under the hood.

Knowing I'd have to move fast as a startup, choosing easy to use tools was imperative.

One of the first stack decisions any startup makes is which server host to use.

For HostedMetrics, I chose DigitalOcean because it gets the job done with minimal fuss and frustration. It has just the right amount of choices, tweaking, and details to get a startup up and running.

So, why not @AWS? As a software engineer, my experience with AWS stretches for over a decade. During that time, I've never held a positive opinion of the user experience on their platform. Newly added products suffer the same problem too, surprisingly.

We use DigitalOcean for our small to medium-sized projects. The nice thing about it is that the initial setup is so easy and fast that we can do in real time with our clients. This solidifies the bond with the clients because for maybe the first and only time they understand and see what's happening. We think DigitalOcean has set a new standard for cloud platforms in terms of price, design and workflow.

We use Hetzner Online AG since the inception of our business, because of the great prices, marvelous support and great interface (especially the new cloud interface). Other options that we tested are DigitalOcean (was more expensive than the new hetzner cloud and didn't offer "huge" dedicated servers), @Vultr (about the same issue as with DigitalOcean , although the prices were better), OVH (Prices, old interface, no "tiny" packages and [at least back at the day] only monthly payment) and Living Bots (Only dedicated servers, too expensive for our needs).

Hetzner offered the best spectrum of servers and has great prices and REALLY great prices in the server auctions.