Alternatives to Vultr

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.

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!

What is the data transfer out cost (Bandwidth cost) on Linode compared to Microsoft Azure?

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.

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.

Google Compute Engine Amazon Web Services OVH Microsoft Azure Go GitHub

Last week, we released a fresh new release of Komiser with support of multiple AWS accounts. Komiser support multiple AWS accounts through named profiles that are stored in the credentials files.

You can now analyze and identify potential cost savings on unlimited AWS environments (Production, Staging, Sandbox, etc) on one single dashboard.

Read the full story in the blog post.

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

• GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
• Respectively Git as revision control system
• SourceTree as Git GUI
• Visual Studio Code as IDE
• CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
• Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
• SonarQube as quality gate
• Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
• VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
• Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
• Heroku for deploying in test environments
• nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
• SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
• Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
• PostgreSQL as preferred database system
• Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

• Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
• Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
• Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
• Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
• Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
• Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

We chose AWS because, at the time, it was really the only cloud provider to choose from.

We tend to use their basic building blocks (EC2, ELB, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS) rather than vendor specific components like databases and queuing. We deliberately decided to do this to ensure we could provide multi-cloud support or potentially move to another cloud provider if the offering was better for our customers.

We’ve utilized c3.large nodes for both the Node.js deployment and then for the .NET Core deployment. Both sit as backends behind an nginx instance and are managed using scaling groups in Amazon EC2 sitting behind a standard AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

While we’re satisfied with AWS, we do review our decision each year and have looked at Azure and Google Cloud offerings.

#CloudHosting #WebServers #CloudStorage #LoadBalancerReverseProxy