Where do you host websites / apps?

[steven]

Hello!

The company I work for is a web / app development & design agency. We have upwards of 3,000 sites & apps that we maintain, spread across roughly 300 servers. Currently we're hosting in DigitalOcean, it's fine. No real complaints other than their partner program isn't amazing (they do give a discount of 5% - 10% depending on monthly revenue) and all of their IP addresses are blacklisted by mail servers (we don't host email, so it's not an issue but we've run into issues with it before for other reasons).

Every couple of years we end up having to rebuild our entire infrastructure, as operating systems go EOL. 2024 is that year, and it's fast approaching. This is the time where we start looking at where we're hosting and figure out if there are better places to host. The main requirements we have are...

• Likelihood of them going under is minimal - typically we look for publicly traded companies or private companies that are too big to fail.
• Stable pricing Month / Month - We're an agency that charges a flat rate for our hosting costs every month, so we need to be able to estimate them and keep them semi-consistent.
• Quick support turn around - We don't need support often, but when we do it's usually because of some emergency that is out of our hands and we need something done quickly.

So this leads me to my questions for you... Where do you host? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? Do you wish you could host elsewhere?

[JBV]

We host using Pantheon and I highly recommend them. I think this is our 5th or 6th year. https://pantheon.io/plans/pricing They are reliable and consistent with great support. We have nowhere near your number of sites and servers. We also use AWS for servers, for better or worse. 😬

[BScott]

I got a recommendation for https://www.cloudways.com/ on LinkedIn, but I have no history or review with them, so I don't know how reliable they are, nor how good their support is. So take it with a massive grain of salt and do a lot of research.

I host some personal sites but not nearly at that scale. They do reselling, but I've only done dozens, not hundreds, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to manage on their service.

@JBV, thanks for chiming in with your recommendation. 

[steven]

@JBVI personally really like Pantheon! But we have Laravel, custom PHP CMS websites, and a few others that they don't support unfortunately.

@BScottThe only problem with CloudWays is that it's managed hosting, and we want fully unmanaged 😕

Thank you both for the recommendations!!

[BScott]

I hear you! When you have that many sites, it's much easier when you have full control. That's why I don't think I can recommend my hosting company. It's for smaller sites / resellers. Will keep looking, though!