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I host my stuff with Hetzner in large part because their tools are straighforward and easy to use and they're based in a country whose laws respect privacy.
If you're hosting with a company that's US-based, you have to worry about their laws affecting your site, which isn't an acceptable requirement in my opinion.
DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.
However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.
One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.
Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.
We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.
Pros of Amazon EC2
- Quick and reliable cloud servers644
- Scalability515
- Easy management391
- Low cost276
- Auto-scaling269
- Market leader88
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable78
- Free tier66
- Easy management, scalability57
- Flexible12
- Easy to Start10
- Web-scale9
- Widely used8
- Elastic8
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard4
- Lots of configuration options3
- GPU instances2
- Amazing for individuals1
- Extremely simple to use1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
- Simpler to understand and learn1
Pros of Heroku
- Easy deployment703
- Free for side projects460
- Huge time-saver374
- Simple scaling348
- Low devops skills required261
- Easy setup189
- Add-ons for almost everything174
- Beginner friendly153
- Better for startups149
- Low learning curve133
- Postgres hosting47
- Easy to add collaborators41
- Faster development30
- Awesome documentation24
- Simple rollback19
- Focus on product, not deployment18
- Easy integration15
- Natural companion for rails development15
- Great customer support11
- GitHub integration7
- No-ops6
- Painless & well documented5
- Just works3
- Free3
- PostgreSQL forking and following2
- I love that they make it free to launch a side project2
- Great UI2
- MySQL extension2
Pros of PythonAnywhere
- Web apps9
- Easy Setup8
- Great support6
- Super-easy to use6
- Shell access6
- Libraries5
- Free plan5
- Many things like Python are pre-installed0
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work13
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3
Cons of Heroku
- Super expensive22
- No usable MySQL option6
- Not a whole lot of flexibility6
- Storage5
- Low performance on free tier4
Cons of PythonAnywhere
- Really small community1
- No root access0