Alternatives to SoftLayer

Hello, I'm currently writing an e-commerce website with Laravel and Laravel Nova (as an admin panel). I want to start deploying the app and created a DigitalOcean account. After some searches about the deployment process, I saw that the setup via DigitalOcean (using Droplets) isn't very easy for beginners. Now I'm not sure how to deploy my app. I am in between Laravel Forge and DigitalOcean (?Apps Platform or Droplets?). I've read that Heroku and Laravel Vapor are a bit expensive. That's why I didn't consider them yet. I'd be happy to read your opinions on that topic!

Hi, I'm a beginner at using MySQL, I currently deployed my crud app on Heroku using the ClearDB add-on. I didn't see that coming, but the increased value of the primary key instead of being 1 is set to 10, and I cannot find a way to change it. Now I`m considering switching and deploying the full app and MySql to DigitalOcean any advice on that? Will I get the same issue? Thanks in advance!

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.

Hosting updown.io started with a single OVH server and quickly grew to more server, first it was DigitalOcean VMs and we were very satisfied about them. But we then noticed some shortcomings about #IPv6 networking, although DigitalOcean supports it they don't provide the standard IP range to each VM (by choice) and thus have to block port 25 to avoid other machines being blocked in case of spammer. This is not good for us it means we can't monitor IPv6 SMTP servers properly, that's why we switched to @Vultr (one of their main competitors) which provides similar prices, more locations, and true IPv6 support with no blocked ports. Of course they offer less tools and the support is probably better at DigitalOcean but so far we're happy with @Vultr.

We still use some @OVH servers (which offers tremendous price/performance ratio) for the main web and database server + 2 of the daemons. In addition to this, we also have 2 DigitalOcean VMs for the secondary web and database server and for the automatic TLS termination proxy used to automatically issue Let's Encrypt certs for status page custom domains (for these servers the IPv6 port block is not an issue)

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.