I second the suggestion of Ramnode. I've used them for both small openvz 'personal projects' as well as much larger multi-node setups. They're all pro as far as i'm concerned....also reliable, fast & i've never had a problem reaching their tech support (and god knows i've had to reach out to them at the worst times of the night in the past when something wasn't working as planned). There's another VPS service that is also fast + reliable though they're more for people who already know what they're doing that shares a similar name - ramhost.us. I currently have two small vps accounts on ramhost.us for various scripts/apps that help make my life easier. I couldn't recommend either service enough to be honest.

Linode.com is also pretty reliable + fast (though I do realize they are right now experiencing a datacenter being down).

I use to have lots of small vps's going (I was a regular on lowendbox.com) back a few years ago (some were dev, some were for clients, some were just all the open source projects I was working on. It all boils down to exactly what you want to get out of it (also where in the world you want to host it). For instance right now i just need two low-end openvz nodes that don't pull in much traffic, hence my choice with continuing with ramhost.us rather than Ramnode or linode (they've got small packages + frequent discounts for new accounts). Another option i would have easily chosen would be hostigation.com. These aren't for big production sites though (although i'm sure they'd handle them without a glitch).

My biggest suggestion is stay away from any service that has hosting as a secondary option (i.e. all the domain registrars and hosts who have shared hosting as their primary source of business).

For personal use, I use BigV[0] and for a pet project which deals with reasonably large datasets I picked up a Hetzner dedicated for $cheap in their Server Auction[1] with 32Gb RAM which is fine for playing around on :)

[0] https://bigv.io/ [1] https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/country/GB

I don't use DO but what features is it missing?

IMO aws/etc aren't "VPS providers".

If you just want a virtualised machine, they're worse in many ways because you have to work around the "features" of the platform.

If you want an actual VPS provider (or even dedicated hardware or a mix of both), I recommend RimuHosting.

If you want to buy into the platform lock in of AWS/etc I recommend you re-think your options and goals.

RimuHosting, as well as good products, has outstanding service: a very personable and highly capable organisation.

I switched from Hostgator to Linode and I have been a lot happier with my Linode VPS. They have more OS choices (the only I've found so far that has Ubuntu) and recently they came out with a $10/month plan which I want to switch to so I don't have to keep paying $20. Their customer support is great as well. They have step-by-step articles on how to set everything up in a secure way and the DNS can be managed through their website which is so much better than having to do all that myself.

Linode has always been the go-to for my small and large scale projects.

This is the cheapest I've found, ~$15- never used it though. https://contabo.com/?show=configurator&vserver_id=145

By good i read between your lines "cheap". Use cheap for early testing, prototyping. Use AWS,Azure,Heroku for production. Simple as that.

I use OVH kimsufi's dedicated server as it can be pretty cheap and VPS in general doesn't serve 100% of my needs.

> but it lacks a lot of features needed to setup a proper system.

...such as?