I’ve published over 25 websites using the Trellis/Bedrock stack and every one of them I’ve chosen to host with Digital Ocean. Reading discussions here and on GitHub that seems to be the most popular option. Out of curiosity, does anyone host their Trellis-based projects elsewhere?
1 Like
DigitalOcean for almost all sites, although recently have put a couple sites on Kinsta that I’m deploying to with Trellis + CircleCI
2 Likes
All DO. Haven’t had a site need more than a $5 server, either, though that may say more about the size of my clients than it does about DO.
1 Like
Unlike DO they have a server in Sydney (I’m in Australia). As cheap as anyone else and have been very reliable.
I’ve been running a lot of benchmarks against different VPS providers. It’s become a bit of obsession. DO are obviously the go-to option but other providers do offer some very interesting differentiators, be it price, features or performance.
The selection I tested is based on having European data centres, ideally UK/London. However, most of the below also have worldwide coverage.
Here’s are some interesting options I’ve tested recently (more details available on request…):
Vultr
Very impressive performance even on their cheapest servers, great choice of instance sizes. Bit of a marketing bait and switch with their $2.50 plan; they performed amazingly well but they after a few weeks they mysteriously “sold out”. Presumably after loads of people registered and added credit with a view of spending on those cheap servers, they simply pulled the plug.
Hetzner
Fairly good performance, no cost if a server is destroyed within 14 days (we use a lot of short lived instances). Very cost effective backup storage boxes. Starting a new instance can take a little bit though (maybe 20 mins). Only German data centres.
VPS Server
Somewhat surprisingly the best performance we’ve tested so far. Also great storage sizes for the price.
UpCloud
Minimum plan is $10, so not ideal for staging but their support is extremely proactive and helpful. I reached out with a fairly simple question (they have some firewall restrictions on their trial) and they credited $100 to my account to use as I wished so I could test properly. For me, that speaks volumes i.e. they believe in their platform.
Aruba Cloud
Literally the worse control panel I’ve ever used. BUT… they have $1 instances (1 core, 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD, 2TB/month transfer) available in Italy or the Czech Republic. Impressively, they also use Intel Xeon E5-2650L v4s and the servers perfrom pretty amazingly. Perfect for staging servers 
2 Likes
I know that’s what it says in the Dashboard, but I thought the official reasoning is they’re limited to two per account?
They initially limited it to two per account (which also wasn’t mentioned in any of their marketing that I saw) but now you can’t spin up a single $2.50 instance.
I wouldn’t really mind too much, it’s super cheap (guessing a loss leader) but they don’t even list them as sold out on the pricing page which just feels a bit dishonest. They’ve been sold out for several months now.
1 Like
Out of interest, how much sysadmin knowledge do you feel is required to manage DO servers? I’ve been tempted to give them a try but would likely need to hire help pretty quickly if anything went wrong!
@MWDelaney @ben
Trellis takes this headache away from me. If something goes wrong with a server (provided I have backups of the database and uploads), I just rebuild and re-provision it.
I suppose Trellis could be considered sysadmin knowledge.
1 Like
Thanks for the advice! I’m not fully using Trellis yet (currently using a Vagrant setup), I need to get onto that asap!
A bit dishonest?
Well, actually Vultr still advertises the $2.50 plan as a valid option and then you login and learn that it’s not an option at all (“temporarily sold out” for months now). I wouldn’t mind at all if it was advertised as some kind of promotional offer (limitited by time or number of instances e.g.). But this way Vultr is completely out of question for me.
Thanks for the other suggestions.
thank you for sharing this 
Aruba - oh no, their cp is hilariously bad and I will give it a try as a dev-staging server because their service is also hilariously inexpensive 
I’ve been using DO and Vultr
Tell me about it
If you need a hand with their control panel (it’s that bad) let me know! Once you’re up and running, all good though.
Wish other cloud hosts would offer that $1/mo option, it’s perfect for small sites.
we’ve been using LiquidWeb for a while now, for various hosting needs, and are exceedingly impressed with their service and support. Recommended.
I’ve been using capistrano to deploy to Kinsta… but are looking to move to using Trellis and CircleCI. If you have time would you be able to share an example of your config/workflow?
Ben, can you share your Trellis + CircleCI setup please?
Pretty happy with DO since 2012. In 2013 as an early adopter I’ve been grandfathered in for free bandwidth forever, which is a nice perk.
Im going to have to disagree about liquidweb. I drank the koolaid so to speak based on all there docs and package offerings. The “White Glove Migration” is a bunch of lip stick on the pig. DO has been rock solid and amazingly thanks to ben and the roots team to include all the contributions to the whole roots workflow I’ve never has a client need support from the hosting aspect. After a lengthily call with a lead tech regarding the best solution for a client and most importantly respecting there nexaccess acquisition to include there GitHub playbooks I was sure that they had taken the roots workflow to the next level. I just have to say they dropped the ball. and Dropped it hard…Either I’ve become very comfortable to cloud DO our I ate the wrong pill. As a developer very comfortable with the roots team workflow and DO infrastructure I ended up kicking myself in the rear thinking I could rely on there support for a client at handoff. Lesson be learned. IMO.
1 Like