Awesome, Daniel! They have a great support team and documentation including a migration walkthrough, but let me know if you run into any issues or have any questions and I’d be happy to help where I can.
We host a lot of products (and clients’ too) under AWS.
Depending on which type of websites : static, PHP-based (we mainly develop using ZF2)… we rely on different services like EC2, S3, CloudFront… etc.
Happy to help if you need any help !
Another vote for Linode. I had an absolutely terrible time with WPEngine a year or so ago, but seem to be in the minority.
For small sites or testing out an idea/app I recommend hostgator as you can quickly get up a site/app with an SSL for $15/mo.
For VPS and scaling apps I recommend Linode.
For WP sites WPengine has been great and I highly recommend them.
Microsoft has a terrific program in BizSpark. It’s pretty easy for product bootstrappers to apply. Through bizspark you get 3 years of free Azure hosting (up to $150/month I think). When I first started, my app was built for a regular server, so I’m hosting everything on one VM instance. You don’t have to code anything special when using VM’s. Windows and Linux are both supported. I also am spinning up a Wordpress website instance. (I don’t have content on it yet.)
Note: I’m not affiliated with Microsoft, and some things about them I don’t like at all, but it’s hard to beat good/free hosting.
I use Joyent, Linode, MediaTemple and Cleverkite. My favorites are Linode and Cleverkite.
I have a fair bit of Linode surface area: 2 accounts, with 10 servers between them. For the most part they’ve been solid, but lately (on my most recently added Linode), I had 2 failures in the same week.
The host that my Linode was on died, so they moved it to another host, which died 2 days later, so they moved me again, and it’s been solid since. Their hardware seems to be flaky in some circumstances. But as with any web host, it’s really the luck of the draw as to which server you’re on, and which hardware is going to fail.
Anyone can set up a great looking sales page and sell you some servers, but Linode still gets my business because their control panel is awesome. I especially love that when you reboot your Linode, you can watch it boot as if you were at the physical server looking at a monitor (you can watch it detect hardware, run fsck and such), instead of issuing a reboot request and blindly waiting 5 minutes for ssh to come back up.
They also get my business because their service is great and responsive.
When searching for hosting, you never really know what you’re getting, so you need a company that stands behind you and doesn’t make you feel helpless when your server is down. You need great support. Linode gets that right. The rest is up to you (when running a prod app, you need redundancy, so one server going down doesn’t necessarily take your app down).
You have to email them and give them reasons why you need more servers? Wow. That’s a total non-starter.
Thanks, Ken. ManageWP is great. In fact, it is so great it’s making me jealous- why didn’t I think of this idea? And its free for me, as I only manage 3 WP sites
1 Like
I’ve been looking at Fortrabbit closely, anyone had any experience? They’re working on rolling out HHVM support which is intriguing.
Hah, sooo tempting to use my affiliate link here, but I won’t 
I honestly have been pleased with A Small Orange for marketing site hosting, and other small sites. Their cheapest shared hosting is $35 a YEAR, and I have not had any issues with them for years. They also offer affordable VPS hosting as well.
For app hosting, +1 @ian’s recommendation for Arcustech. Seriously great support, especially if you don’t know your SSL from your elbow, their support technicians handle just about anything you need with a simple email request.
Another vote for Arcustech. Excellent support from those guys. I also run many of my client sites on EngineHosting, which is run by the same team at Arcustech I believe.
For static sites without SSL, I’ve been extremely happy with http://www.paperplane.io/. For $9/month, you can essentially map as many GitHub repos and Dropbox folders as you’d like to the web. Supports custom DNS as well (ala projects.chrisvannoy.com). Another note: Very much a self-funded/micropreneur outfit themselves.
For ones where I need SSL, I’m using Amazon S3 with Cloudfront to handle the SSL certificate. www.techrecruiterguides.com is hosted this way.
For stuff where I actually need a backend: I’ve used Linode pretty extensively (this actually reminds me that I need to shut those down soon), but I also had a time when I spread out image processing workers on as many free services as I could find: Heroku, DotCloud, and AppFog at the time. Heroku’s the only one that still has a free tier (1 dyno) as far as I can tell.
I also have some smaller stuff on Digital Ocean (my blog, primarily). Day job uses a lot of Microsoft Azure and we’ve been really happy with that as well.
1 Like