ghettosoak

I have been with DigitalOcean for about 5 years now. I have decided that I would like a new VPS provider. 5 years ago, Linode was the closest competitor, closing the gap with its' customer service, but losing out to the attractive price of its competitor.

However, I know that Google and Amazon offer competing services – which carry their own implicit standards – but I guess I’d like to give my money to a ‘smaller’ competitor where possible?

Ultimately: I need a VPS that I can run a current version of Ubuntu on. Whereupon I can run PHP, MySQL, Node.js and its respective trimmings. Something I can play around with, but something that I can ship code and run my various products on.

Customer support is a significant selling point. So too is ease-of-use, and functionality of updates.

I'm willing to consider an increase in monthly price. I currently pay USD 5 per month.

As an American, I like the idea of my server running somewhere near home. As an expat living in Switzerland, I do have a certain partiality to Swiss products.

Any experience / suggestion is welcome. Help!

After much deliberation of pulling the trigger on the 7 $/mo private Github account, I'm leaning heavily towards Gitlab.

EDIT: I'm setting up a private repo for an upcoming project, and I'd like to run the issue tracking through some git service, potentially scaling to include a Kanban Board. Not sure if it's gonna be just me or other devs. This looks promising:

http://kanban.leanlabs.io/

I've set myself the challenge of being as financially prudent as humanly possible, especially with this project, as it is an extremely low budget.

If Gitlab can offer free private accounts, with a couple cool features thrown in on the side, why shouldn't I use it?

Which do you use? Why not the other?

PS – I'm not from Gitlab, I'm just some hacker trying to lock up his stack. :)