Josh made a recent post here about preferred static site hosting; I am similarly looking for the best non-static site hosting solutions. I am studying web development across the full stack and have made a number of projects involving back end servers (using rails, node, express) and I was wondering what people use for hosting those kinds of things.
I have some of my own projects on Heroku free hosting but it has some pretty rough limits and drawbacks. I would consider paying a small fee for the right solution.
My projects are generally pretty low traffic, but I have an increasing number.
2 Likes
I use DigitalOcean and Linode. They both start at $5/month. You can get a $50 credit on DO with the link on the page below.
1 Like
Josh beat me to the punch on recommending digitalocean.
They’ve been releasing more and more managed services, but I mostly use their $5 ‘droplets’ (VMs). If your projects are small, you could probably serve quite a few from one VM.
If there is interest, we could spend one Wednesday meetup deploying DigitalOcean servers and setting up nginx, etc.
I usually go through a checklist to set up my servers, but would be curious to see how other people do it to find out if anything could be improved. I also have at least one unsolved nginx question (a query string problem). 
Since I’m an I.T. geek and fond of rolling my own servers, Linode—as suggested earlier—is the one I prefer for the paid variety of hosting.
But then again, I’ve used Heroku, h o o k . i o, z e i t . c o, Firebase.