A2 Hosting are an amazing bunch of people. I wouldn't have learned half of what I know about setting up a server if it had not been for them so I'm very thankful to them. They offered a very good service at a very good price but they also had their problems.
When I first set up my VPS early last year I got a lot of help with setting up DNS records and so on (something I can do myself nowadays) but what I didn't get I got from a website I came across a few years ago called DigitalOcean.
I cannot tell you how many times I've googled something and found an article on DigitalOcean that explains a perfect solution to my problem. More and more I started to think it would be good to host with DigitalOcean but I stuck with A2 until about November.
In November I got hosting credit for DigitalOcean so I thought I'd give it a try and see what DigitalOcean was like, especially now since I am more competent with setting up my own server. I wrote the server_setup script that I use to configure a server, created my first Droplet and transferred a recent site backup to DigitalOcean. Boom! It worked.
Performance wise, on the front end DigitalOcean was a bit faster than A2, which to me seemed unbelievable since A2 was blazingly fast as it was.
But I mentioned A2 had problems. There weren't many of those and I think A2 are fantastic but they did have one thing lacking that something that is more tailored to system admins/developers should have and that is snapshots. When I first moved to A2 I asked if they offer snapshots but unfortunately not. DigitalOcean provides snapshots! Snapshots allow me to make backups from time to time, for instance before a big update or whatever. It also means I have a secondary, weekly backup of my server.
So all in all, I'm sad to be leaving A2 but happy to be moving to my fourth host for my fourth iteration of my website. Hello DigitalOcean!
