Selection criteria for hosting service? Any suggestion?

Digital ocean is really good, you can laravel forge with it. But yes DO require little server knowledge.

Somehow I don't prefer pagodabox

@abhimanyusharma003 Thanks for the suggestion. I've been using AWS for a couple of years though, I think I need to leave from it.

I have used Pagodabox before but I would advise against it now. They have been promising Pagodabox V2 for as long as I can remember now, and from what I can see they haven't really added improved anything in almost a year. Also not having root access can be a pain.

On the other hand I can't recommend Digital Ocean enough, their vps are super quick and greta value for money.

@zefman Thanks for the comment. Now I start studying the Digital Ocean.

Btw the speed test from my place to the Digital Ocean's Singapore server(which is the closest from Seoul Korea) records 14Mbps@download. On the other hand it's 70Mbps@download from my place to the Speedtest.net's Seoul probing server.

What is the your speed from your place to your closest DO's speed. The test page is here and you can choose the server location. http://speedtest-sgp1.digitalocean.com/

Digital Ocean works perfectly fine and is relatively easy to maintain a server with. They also have quite a lot of posts about how to install additional software on their servers, and they're really quick with providing instructions to fix security holes that might pop up.

That said, if you want (easy) scaling and all that, it's hard to beat AWS, but it does require quite a bit more attention and knowledge.

I used to do testing and small things on Digital Ocean, but since I've had to get into AWS for work related things, I'm using AWS more and more for personal stuff as well.

@rigwit Thanks for sharing your experience.

Yes you are right. AWS requires more knowledge, and is a perfect place for the super powered man. As an application dev guy, system work is quite challenging.

Recently I faced a problem in AWS. Apache was eating 99% of the CPU in one of my services hosted in AWS (20~30 concurrent users, small instance). I cloned all the code and data to a local VM and found out it costs only 3 % of CPU. I spent a week searching for a solution but did not made it.

If I had a good bit of knowledge or good system engineer with me... I might have...

Strange things happen at Amazon at times :)

I do wonder what would happen if you started a new instance on Amazon and copy the code and data to that new instance. Might be the instance got corrupted somehow, are the hardware it's running on had some issue.. I've noticed that some older instances we have that have been running for a couple of years do cause issues like what you mention.

@rigwit Good idea! But what I wanted to know was, was the the problem stemming from application code and data, or from the system. If it was from application side I would have done a debugging or optimization job, but it turned out to be the system that I don't have expertise. Essentially that's the reason I'm looking for a new hosting service hoping for less system job.