Digital Ocean hits the sweet spot for me with both pricing, availability, speed, and ease of getting up and running for a project like this. You can have a new server up and running in 30 seconds and locked down within 10.

Bryan Kennedy has a great write up to help you get it set up and locked down: http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essen...

We put our own twist on it which improves on his base (mostly security related): https://github.com/codelittinc/incubator-resources/blob/mast...

+1 to codelitt's suggestion. We've been running our stack for Tenreads (http://tenreads.io) on DO since the last year now. Wouldn't say we are running a high throughput flow for our backend/web apps, but with our core pipelines, DO has been a really good choice with, to quote codelitt again, "sweet spot of cost and performance".

PS: We've been facing issues with certain regions of late, but the team is fairly responsive and helpful with getting fixes through.

Hosting like godaddy tends to not differ in performance between their lowest and highest packages, they just differ in cheap resources such as space, bandwidth, "number of allowed email accounts" etc. Processor, memory consumption and maximum concurrent users don't change.

Do you know anyone that is familiar with setting up VM's or managing servers? If so, hit them up and get them to set you up a linode vm (or whatever other provider you want) with nginx. If you don't, perhaps looking at getting a contractor to set you up.

DigitalOcean (and probably others) have a pre-prepared web server VM you can spin up

In the short term, switching most pages to static html would do wonders for speed and let you work out a long-term strategy. Static pages behind something like nginx should handle any load.

Your problem might not be your host (thought Godaddy is unlikely to be good), as much as a lack of caching on whatever website software you're using (WP?).

You can slap a caching plugins on wordpress and make 99.99% of requests never hit the database... usually takes you from being able to serve 10 requests per core to a few 100.... (Not as good as static HTML, but I am not sure he needs the million pages per second yet)

Yes sure, by short-term I meant for the next few hours - static html might be an easier option when the server is on fire. Think of it as a poor man's caching :)

That definitely sounds like a good option. Let me do that now

Use DigitalOcean ( Cheap & reliable but sometimes I feel that my speeds are capped ), But if you need high performance you should go with Dedicated server ( Online.net or OVH )

P.S I've been using Digitalocean for about 19months now. (edit)

As a counterpoint to all the DigitalOcean suggestions, I prefer https://www.vultr.com over DO.

(not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer)

I have considered vultr.. other than a few dollars cheaper, is there any other killer feature?

The things that most annoy me about digital ocean (No S3 like thing, no way to change your ratio of CPU to Memory to Disk) seem the same.

Edit - Noticed the giant hard drive instances. Super interesting. That could be enough to make me flip.

I used DO for a few years and had wild network performance swings at various times. Vultr has been much better in that regard. I also prefer Vultr's administration panel over DO's. They have more datacenter locations, too.

Hum very tempting, may have to spin up a few boxes and see how it looks

This kind of worries me as a tech company, you have no devops guy?

We are currently migrating our website to a better hosting platform. Should be up and running in 20 mins

awesome ;)

joyent?