Moving everything, and saving money while doing so
In May of 2013 I move a bunch of websites from Dreamhost (it’s a referral link) over to FlipHost. Since discovering DigitalOcean (it’s a referral reward link), I’ve been slowly moving most of my hosting over to them.
I wasn’t at all uphappy with the service provided by FlipHost. In fact, their support was excellent and I had come to know the owner quite well. They’re all really great people. However, PuPHPet and DigitalOcean are impossible for me to resist any longer.
The ability to spin up droplets at will is amazing and the API makes building simple, custom control panels very simple. Even though their dash board is already pretty visually appealing.
I do still have a few sites for friends and family hosted at Dreamhost (also a referral reward link), but I’ll be moving them over to small DigitalOcean droplets within the coming weeks. One VPS at FlipHost has been canceled already and the other has been shutdown for the past 24 hours now, so I’ll be canceling it soon too.
Everything else has been moved to DigitalOcean for some time, including longren.org. The same droplet also servers kegplan.io, but it’ll be getting it’s own droplet very shortly. And then I have a droplet that’s sole purpose is to act as a tor node.
By moving everything to DigitalOcean, I’ll be saving about $30 a month on hosting. I’m currently spending about $60 to $70 a month on hosting.
Loading ...In addition to the great service provided by DigitalOcean, they have a pretty neat mascot, he looks good on t-shirts, too.
DigitalOcean has been great so far, especially their customer service and general availability. I love their one-click application installs, too, which makes installing software like WordPress super simple. I have yet to have any issues with DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean droplets start at only $5/month. If you’d like to try it out, you can signup using my referral link, https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=cbf49d0481c8, which will give me account credit. You should also keep an eye on the DigitalOcean Twitter account, as they frequently give discount codes that can get you a couple months of free hosting.
If you’re in the market for a new webhost, definitely give DigitalOcean a shot. Beware though, as with nearly everything, there’s negatives as well. Raam Dev posted a comment warning about how a DigitalOcean site was taken down due to a post on the site that was critical of a friend of the DigitalOcean CEO. There’s plenty of other not-so-good experiences with DigitalOcean, too. Luckily, my ride with DigitalOcean has been totally smooth.
Well, now what?
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Longren.io is proudly hosted by DigitalOcean
My opinion of Digital Ocean was tainted by this story of how Digital Ocean shut down someone’s blog because they didn’t remove or edit a blog post where someone had written negatively about someone who happened to be a friend of a Digital Ocean CEO.
In any case, drama like that (and the general issues that come with web hosting) led me to start my own hosting company in 2005, which I started mainly for family, friends, and clients (and hosting my own sites). I’ve had to prevent it from growing because the demand has been so high. I have no desire to manage a large hosting company (a small one that hosts 60+ domains is enough to fulfill my occasional hunger for messing around on servers and running a hosting company). I lease a dedicated server from LiquidWeb ($200/mo) and use WHMCS to take care of automation (it helps automate the creation of new accounts, integrates with payment gateways, generates invoices, etc.). The income from the business pays for the server + a little extra, which pays for my personal domain renewals.
That’s good info to know, and really, really crappy that they’d do something like that. Do you know how the situation ended up? Did the guy ever get his site back? Hopefully I don’t make enemies with any friends of the CEO, lol.
I’ve heard great things about WHMCS, and have thought about going the route you took, with getting a dedicated server and managing it with WHMCS.
I don’t know how it ended, but it was a big reminder for me how important reputation is and how easily your true nature can show through (and become widely known) via the Internet.