Who are people currently using as hosting providers?
48 points by olliej
48 points by olliej
(I think of the options "web" is the best tag here? I guess you could argue "devops" but I think that would be overselling the complexity of "what hosting service do you use?" :D )
[edit: an update from a real person at DH: their payment processor only supports IE Chrome]
While I am loathe to post this kind of question on lobsters - not because I don't think there'll be useful advice, but because I think it's low quality vs most of the other things being posted (both stories/articles and questions), but who do people currently use as hosting providers? I don't do anything particularly interesting or server dependent, just email, a static site, a couple of bash script generated sites ( :D ) and email. Google and DDG are both swamped with sites that haven't really been trustworthy in years.
So who are people using these days?
For context:
I've been using dreamhost for almost 2 decades, but their site and support have just become absolutely atrocious, they've got a force enabled "spam filter" that consistently classes email with all appropriate "not spam" headers, from trustworthy domains, to the extent that at one point they started silently bouncing email so it never even appeared in the junk folder. That BS literally cost me a few hundred dollars, and yet they still continued to force it on me, and didn't even offer any compensation. In fact when they "white listed" the company that they had been silently bouncing (there's literally no way to tell if they're doing it) they acted like they were doing me a favor. The final straw was a support request I just made, in which I first had to deal with text predictor nonsense, and when I finally got a reply from support I just got a form response that clearly demonstrated that they had not even bother reading the report so it might as well have been a bot. Just the standard "update your browser" "clear your caches" "disable ad blockers" "don't use a VPN", where my response is (paraphrased here because even if the support responses are garbage the support people aren't to blame for the garbage site or service):
Of course I already tried that, your website has become increasingly garbage for years so I just presumptively assume it's only been written for/tested on
IEChrome, and things like VPNs, ad blockers, tracker blockers should not be impacting any of that (wtf do you have tracking scripts on your payment page? or anywhere else for that matter?)
[addendum: the support response was such a template that I looked again at what the support person said about my support request, and then went back to my prior support request (same template). So the only "human" part of this template is a description of my request, and having compared them they are clear slop, and there's not a single person involved at any part of the process. So my attempt to avoid the garbage slop support on the webpage (slop support bots are literally just bad FAQ+doc search tools, why even bother?), by using a support system that is designed to appear to involve actual human support, is also just slop. Not even marked as such. Just passed off as human to try and pretend that there's any interest in supporting customers.]
I have used and would recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net for static site hosting, but they don’t host email, unfortunately.
For email, I’m looking at FastMail and PurelyMail, so I’d be curious to hear experiences with those.
Fastmail is fantastic. Their email works great and they make it very easy to integrate with third-parties. The caldav server also has support for tasks and vjournal, which is a neat bonus.
I've been a happy fastmail user for over 10 years. I have two accounts and a handful of domains
I enjoy Fastmail. I appreciate that they are more than a fancy RoundCube whitelabel. They really understand email and contribute to open standards and cyrus.
Going on 5 years of never thinking about email hosting. I have a vps with a postfix *@otherdomain forwarding rule and they accept it into my inbox and allow customized From addresses even in the native web and mobile clients which is cool.
Uploading files on mobile can be irritating as the app has to stay foreground and have an uninterrupted network connection. Can't let the phone fall asleep. Maybe an iOS limitation?
I'm also a fan of NearlyFreeSpeech.net for hosting. It hits a sweet spot for me where I don't have to maintain the basic infrastructure (HTTP server, load-balancing, caching, DDoS protection, SSL certificates), but do have enough control to do just about anything I want. For example there is SSH access, they have lots of programming environments preinstalled, you can set up cron jobs, you can run long-lived daemon processes, etc., so it's not limited to solely static websites. But yeah, they don't do email.
I've been a PurelyMail client for about seven years. It works, I use it with a number of my own domains, I pay about $0.5 per month, but none of the inboxes are very large. Spam exists in more quantities than on Gmail, but it's not overwhelming and filters solve most of the problems.
I'm (still) a happy PurelyMail customer, too. However, the company has been bought by somebody else. The new owner wants to raise prices and redesign the website (among other things):
https://news.purelymail.com/posts/updates/2025-12-18-roadmap-2026.html
I wonder what this will turn into and whether it will cause me to selfhost email again...
Yeah the spam filter problem with dreamhost is is not just the garbage filtering (they literally mark invoices from companies like apple, amazon, I think even a few times themselves, again with all the correct DMARC, DKIM, and SPF headers), but that their filter will literally bounce some of them so they're not even in your junk folder. Absolute trash.
Just checked them out again and their advanced pricing calculator is pretty funny.
They want 18 cents more per year if I have a shorter email address than a longer one. I'm very confused.
Edit: Oh, the bottom part seems to clear it up, this does not apply to your own domain. Still a bit weird.
Another recommendation for NearlyFreeSpeech. Costs me under a dollar a month; I've occasionally had people remark on how fast my site is to load; my one brief interaction with their tech support was quick and competent.
I use and recommend both Fastmail (since 2010) and NearlyFreeSpeech (since before 2009) with no reservations. Fastmail are e-mail experts; I subscribe to their blog. NFS are deeply competent at a hard business.
I have been a customer of FastMail for a decade. I only had a very technical issue with them once. I was shortly referred to some engineer or deeply technical person who resolved it. I am glad I pay for email.
I have the opposite experience. I contacted them about a technical issue too (a Sieve filter to attempt to bounce email from an old ledger.com address which is the origin of 99 % of my spam). Immediately marked as WONTFIX – they told me I’m supposed to let the spam folder fill itself. I’m guessing they have an incentive to train their spam filters, and they can only do that if the spammy e-mails get actually stored.
I think you asked for a feature and not an issue/bug? I had a bug (weird situation in which email could not be delivered).
NearlyFreeSpeech.net is great. I always recommend them if you'd prefer to avoid all the server maintenance overhead, while still having a good amount of control. The members forum is a great place for basic support and the other members are nice/helpful.
Something not mentioned by others is the ability to setup "contributions" to your website(s). Where anyone can top up your account balance directly. I haven't seen any other hosting provider offer such a feature.
This thread alerted me to FastMail and I've swapped over three domains to it. The setup process was very easy and support answered a question I had pretty quickly. I'm on a 30-day trial for now, but I can already tell you it's much easier than my previous experiments with RoundCube and dovecot!
I used both NearlyFreeSpeech and Hetzner. For a static website and email, I would recommend Hetzner.
I used to host most of my things at Hetzner, and a large part of my servers are still there. But I started to move most of them into my homelab, keeping a cheap €4/month tiny VPS (still at Hetzner) to front for them, with the rest at home behind a WireGuard tunnel. I still have a few pieces on a bigger server (also at Hetzner), because I didn't have the time to set up a new server in the homelab, but that's legacy, and will be moving home as soon as I get around to it.
The only thing that will not be in this homelab + VPS front setup is my outgoing mail. Most of my outgoing mail goes through SMTP2Go, because while I can trivially self-host incoming mail, I found that some of the entities I have to remain in email contact with use allow lists, and only the Big Providers are on it, so my options are hosting my email at a third party entirely, or something like SMTP2Go for outgoing mail only. As I'm a self-host addict, I chose the latter. My email remains mine.
I'm fairly happy with both Hetzner and SMTP2Go, would recommend both.
I'm curious: Do you relay your emails from your own MTA to SMTP2Go? And does this work on a domain basis?
No, I relay directly to SMTP2Go, and not every mail, just one particular domain - mostly because that's enough for me, and is cheaper (I still fit in the free tier. I wouldn't if I relayed my other domains).
Are you other domains sending a lot of email?
I have multiple domains and it works fine with the free plan.
Some of them, yes. Mostly to myself, though.
But even if they'd fit within the free tier, I still wouldn't relay them, because there's no need. I only use the relay, because I have to correspond with entities that use allow lists. Me & my wife do that from two email addresses, both under the same domain, and there are no automated emails from that domain, so... that goes through the relay.
I don't like using a relay, I prefer self-hosting everything. I use it because I must.
Got it. I just wasn't sure if they allowed more than one domain after you set it up, or something similar.
I also don't use the relay for sending emails to myself (mostly alerts).
The 7+ year old i5 Thinkpad (440) in my closet. It's handled front page news.ycombinator.com for 24 hours no problem.
Deployment?
rsync -r Writing/ web@lt440:/home/web/www/
Yeah I just don’t really want to have to bother with any of the actual maintenance - my sites are trivial (https://nerget.com and https://waffles.dog), but don’t use any site builders or similar because why would I need them? But do run some scripts (waffles is produced by a shell script :D :D)
I do the same except it's a Thinkpad T410 instead and honestly the maintenance consists of "run apt update && apt upgrade every so often; it's really not any work. And honestly after writing that I realized I should just be using unattended-upgrades which would reduce it to zero.
The main downside is I still need a separate service for email and offsite backups.
I'm using https://migadu.com for email hosting . No nonsense, micro plan is more than enough for my needs.
I'm using a cloud provider's free-tier virtual machine for website hosting, but have no intention to promote any of those.
I have been using migadu pretty much since they opened. They had one wobble a few years back otherwise it's been 10+ years of good uptime and quick responses to service tickets.
I have my infrastructure spread across a bunch of hosting providers, on different sides of the iron curtain.
A few years ago the DNS for all of my domains used to be entirely on Google Cloud, and I had them all taken offline at once because some expired credit card bounced a payment for YouTube Music for whatever. That was fun! Learned the lesson and spread stuff out a little bit more, which also exercises the automation a bit more (easy to get stuck on some provider-specific assumptions otherwise).
In decreasing order of importance:
Timeweb is where I rent my most critical dedicated servers; and DNS + mail for some domains
GleSYS is great for VMs, object storage (I run Restic backups there), and domain registration / DNS stuff in general
My home ISPs: I have small machines at home (a Chinese NUC in one flat, and a Dell Optiplex in another). The NUC is on a connection with a public static IPv4 address, and hosts some public-facing stuff (like my blog), some Tailnet services (like Ente and Gonic); the Optiplex runs (custom) home automation stuff and secondary services (e.g. Syncthing). Hosting stuff at home might not get you the reliability a professional hosting provider gives you (though honestly it's also not far away), but it's fun (if you're into that kind of thing)!
Yandex Cloud. I get employee credits there, so maxing that out is a no-brainer! This hosts S3 storage for my Ente photos, and some more DNS.
Adman: I have an older dedicated server in their Novosibirsk DC; this runs a bunch of auxiliary services, nixery.dev and has good connection to other parts of Asia. Adman has no IPv6, so the V6 connections of nixery.dev are proxied through servers with Timeweb, but also IPv6 is basically irrelevant.
Bitfolk: small VPS provider, I have a tiny VM with them for some more auxiliary services. Their automation systems are great!
Shoutout also to Hetzner, of course, though I don't host anything with them right now. For powerful dedicated servers you probably can't beat them on price.
All of these hosters (except Yandex, which is the only "big tech" company in this list) have an important thing in common: You can contact a real human with technical knowledge and an interest in helping you very quickly if something goes wrong! Another lesson learned from Google ...
I'm using bunny.net at the moment. I use their CDN to serve a static site and their file service as its origin. I like it because it's inexpensive, they just pause service when you run out of contributed credit, and I can get daily access logs to process offline. Those logs were the reason I switched from GitHub Pages; I wanted to understand traffic without any injected scripts.
While I am loathe to post this kind of question on lobsters - not because I don't think there'll be useful advice, but because I think it's low quality vs most of the other things being posted…
This would only be a low quality post if we had already talked about it recently. Thanks for asking. :)
Yeah I like these kinds of posts because you often encounter new services and cheaper ways of doing things.
I started colocating before the turn of the century and have not yet seen any reason to stop. Rather, I've seen nothing but more and more reasons to keep colocating and to encourage others to run their own physical servers.
Take a look at https://rackcolo.com to get an idea about how cheap colo can be. That doesn't even count the services that'll host a Pi-sized machine for $10 USD a month or so, or a mini-PC, Mac mini form factor for $15 a month or so. Other options if high uptime isn't the highest priority is running servers at home using a VPN service that offers static, public IPs. Do this with friends and back up each other's services, and you can have high availability, too :)
The bottom line is that pretty much all hosting providers of a certain size or larger have been bought by one of just a handful of megacorporations that've made everything shit. You can't communicate with humans who know anything about the products they sell, you can't in many instances avoid talking to AI "bots", and you can't not get stupid form responses that just waste your time.
If you're not necessarily technical enough to manage a colocated server, or if your interests simply lie elsewhere, consider finding people who might want to work together on it. You might be good at one part - say, web / database / PHP, and another might be good at, say, DNS, and yet another good at email stuff.
Building a small community around shared resources is great, and it gives you a freedom and empowers you like nothing else does. You don't need to worry about Google sending all your data to "Gemini", or Amazon selling your data to US TLAs. You don't have to worry about invisible filters that these companies won't tell you about because 1) you're not allowed to talk to the people who know, and 2) they're "trade secrets" or some bullshit like that.
It's a great feeling, and it's empowering to be able to look at logs and know precisely what's going on and when.
I use vultr, porkbun, and fastmail. I have a mini rack in my living room. Vps and metal is all running nixos.
I am looking for a new s3 host tho, vultr raised their prices and the data I keep in there is just not worth 10 USD a month.
This is my exact setup as well! Porkbun and FastMail have been perfect, I've had a bit of downtime on Vultr, but nothing noticeable in the last year or two.
self-hosting email (postfix+dovecot) for ~16y at Hetzner root server (refreshing every 3-4 years), and fly.io/netcup/vultr/digitalocean/hetzner cloud for VMs for various purposes (e.g. xmpp (ejabberd), conduit (matrix), vaultwarden, headscale et al.) . vultr/digitalocean when latency matters (i.e. close to $HOME hosting), as they have PoPs throughout the world.
I've been a happy user of NearlyFreeSpeech.net for my website (since 2010) and openbsd.amsterdam for my VPS (since 2021).
Email: FastMail. A bit pricey, but I've been using them for over a decade and they're solid.
Domains: Namecheap; though I just started migrating to Porkbun last week since Namecheap is now charging 60-100% more for renewals. I've been with them for 15 years, but the direction they took during the Ukraine war left a bad taste.
Hosting: Cloudflare (Workers/R2) and AWS. In my experience, everything else has been subpar despite Cloudflare's rough DX. With AWS, you can spin up infrastructure (like VMs) pretty quickly using Terraform once you understand basic DevOps; especially with an LLM to help. Most other hosting providers are less reliable, and their support is mostly smoke and mirrors. Support on AWS has been shockingly good for me (maybe I was just lucky?) but I'd get an answer in 2-3 days.
Far too many. For static stuff - Cloudflare pages, seems to work fine and is very little hassle.
I've got a free Oracle Cloud VM (yes, I'm aware of their reputation. I don't use anything else of theirs, but if they want to give away free VMs then fair enough). You can get a 4core ARM VM w/ 24GB of RAM and lots (10TB iirc) outbound bandwidth a month for $0.
I've also used scaleway in the past but I've gone off them (their managed SQL databases I used are not properly managed. they don't patch them enough, and backup/restore is horrendously slow).
So I've went pretty hard into bare metal, OVH and Datapacket for "prod" workflows. So many performance problems just go away with decent (ie: non-"cloud") hardware. A 16 core ryzen "desktop" machine / 128GB of RAM and many TBs of very very fast NVMe storage can be rented for not much more than $100/month. I worked it out this would cost somewhere on the order of $5,000/month on RDS and still not be as fast cos the IO sucks and the epyc cpu cores they use are very slow per thread.
https://grebedoc.dev/ for static site hosting.
Mythic Beasts for DNS, email, and a shell account which hosts a site. https://www.mythic-beasts.com/hosting.
An Optiplex machine at home for self-hosted stuff. None of it important.
I have found Mythic Beasts to be pretty good. It's certainly not the cheapest provider, but their shared hosting isn't exhorbitant (in absolute terms) and their support is excellent (if you email, someone competent will reply – usually very quickly). I really don't want to self-host email and have found the service's deliverability to be pretty good (stuff to GMail/Outlook accounts never bounces IME).
For "hosting" I use a tiny CX23 Hetzner VPS for like 4€ a month. However, I also use their StorageBox (for backups "in the cloud"; cheaper than Backblaze for around 1.5 TB) and DNS zone options because the Hetzner DNS API is nowadays supported by most ACME tools that can request certificates with the DNS-01 challenge (I mostly use traefik for that). So this way even my personal stuff at home (which I can access using Tailscale but it's not exposed anywhere else) all sits behind a registered domain with valid TLS certificates. The domain itself can be registered whereever they support pointing to external DNS servers; I use INWX lately.
For email I switched to Uberspace last year. I primarily wanted to have 1) the possibility of using my own domain, 2) not having to pay for each "account" and instead have a grand total storage space to distribute, 3) catch-all addresses on my primary inbox and 4) not having to host it myself. Uberspace checks all of those boxes. It's not the cheapest option but they're a small shop and I really like their philosophy as well, so I am more than willing to pay the 10€ a month even if I just use them for email.
I've only used VPS for everything for the last 15? 20? years so not the best person to ask.
I have my domains at INWX and I faintly remember pointing someone at their (untested) email hosting and they then said it was fine. They also have webspace, so INWX or netcup is where I personally would look first because I've been a happy customer so far.
I guess for static content it does not matter that much but I'd always prefer something close for the latency if I'm accessing it often.
For random VPS usage in the future, I'd probably go with Scaleway (despite being a pain to navigate their offerings) or Vultr (despite the AI drama before).
Github pages and cloudflare pages, the latter works better, both give me stomach aches in regards to their practices
I'm using Fastmail for mail and DNS. I did use Pobox and came along when they merged the service into Fastmail.
For my website I use https://www.statichost.eu/
openbsd.amsterdam for everything
E-mail might be tricky as you know, because if you happen to get some widely blacklisted IP address it is a pain in the arse to whitewash it again. Still I got lucky with that and the whole setup works fine.
Personal website is netlify free tier. Not particularly proud of this but it's worked for several years now. The beauty of a static site is that it is relatively easy to pack up and leave if needs be.
Same. I've been using Netlify for static hosting for some years now. I do worry I'm going to have to leave soon because they need to pay back their VC money…
I co-own a colocation company in Canada which I won't link to for self-promotion reasons but it's actually really great knowing that some overworked abuse department isn't going to randomly turn my stuff off because someone somewhere complained or my traffic looked "odd". I have my own IP block in my actual name, even.
I also have emails with Migadu.com and self-hosted using Stalwart, both of which I recommend.
DigitalOcean for DNS and a VM to monitor some things. Porkbun for domains. Also have a VPS with very small UK provider https://lagrange.cloud/ who are just a one person operation, as far as I can see. Props to them tho: as long as I have backups I have no problem relying on a human SPOF.
When it comes to hosting, I've been happily using Infomaniak for years at this point.
When it comes to email, I've fully replaced the whole GSuite with Proton since roughly ten years, starting with emails then, and I wouldn't look back.
Brightbox (used to work for them), Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Fly for web hosting purposes.
Email is all Google Workspaces on various domains. Keep thinking I should move to Fastmail, but inertia is a pain.
Hehe, I only heard about Brightbox a couple months ago and the offering sounded interesting, so the browser tab has lived ever on... but I didn't need a new server since then.
I've used Dreamhost myself for a long time (since April 2007) but I forget why exactly I moved away.
I have a somewhat odd setup currently with:
I want to go to a situation that I only need static hosting for my personal website which I can get for free (or nearly for free) from Netlify or some such.
I self-host a lot of what I run on various OVH dedicated servers.
I currently run 4 total:
I don't personally host socials (my friend and local fedi admin domi does) or email (too many things can go wrong for something so important, I've had good experiences with migadu though.
For static site hosting I'm currently going through pico.sh because the devs are fun, but there's nothing really stopping me from just handling those myself again.
I'm using Fastmail, Hetzner, and Bunny for DNS. I'm looking into migrating some websites to Tietokettu.
For the Australians, I've had a great experience running a VPS with BinaryLane. It's a bit more geared towards operators that know what they're doing and most things are designed around that.
Linode for VPS(es), not because I did lots of research and picked the best one after that, but because I did a tiny bit of research, and tried it out, and have been stuck because of inertia ever since. Service has been more or less okay (hardly perfect, though). Biggest problems to date have been: 1. last year's data center meltdown ( https://status.linode.com/incidents/6yw88b0ft94g ) in which I thought I lost the entire disk of my Linode (I actually didn't -- but other customers weren't so fortunate); 2. my IP is part of a block that several major email providers are blocking altogether (including Hotmail).
Email provider is currently Fastmail (re: Linode problem #2, above). Very happy with the service. 100% uptime so far (over a year), all the usual email features, plus IMAP client access (i.e. not just web UI), and easy disposable/pseudo email addresses.
Smallest OVH VPS.
Apparently (very small) amounts of self-hosted email to GMail even get through…
No idea about the current state of support, as I haven't had a need for a long time. (After the data-goes-in-smoke-to-the-real-clouds fire I did get my VPS back after the recovery operations, and then automatically a voucher for a few months worth of hosting for the inconvenience and the expense for paying one month of a VPS in another city, so even then nothing to talk to support about)
Panix is reasonably priced, seem like good people, and they take good enough care of their IP space that I had no trouble standing up a mail server on their $10 VPS
I have email at Migadu. I like the pricing model. Also, the UI is quirky in all the right ways for me.
I use AWS SES for some SMTP. And because Migadu has an incoming email limit, I still keep my Gmail account for monitoring notifications (and calendar- I have not migrated that yet).
Most of my infra is a 128gb of RAM Hetzner auction server. That's paired with a small Netcup VPS to run a separate FreeIPA replica for some extra reliability.
Domain names are mostly at OVH, although I registered a domain at AWS. I had one domain at Gandi but their recent price hikes made ME learn about domain transfers.
I'm playing with a toy project to run a shared Linux system for a small (yet to exist) community where everyone is root. That's on a Contabo VPS.
I do run some infra at home, but in general my rule is to only put there what I don't want to be on a datacenter. I feel that's very few things.
Also a Migadu + Contabo user here.
For what it's worth: [assuming it didn't change] the Migadu limits are 'soft' as in they don't actually exert them automatically but they will be in touch asking you to upgrade if you exceed them regularly, in case that's useful info to you wrt. keeping your monitoring off them.
Contabo VPSes are cheap and cheerful, had very little problem with them in 5+ years of running there.
Oh, yes- it's just that I still have a ton of noisy notifications. I know Migadu's limits are soft, but 200 messages a day... I run an Incarnator instance configured to send me emails for errors and it can easily go over that- I'd rather keep within the limits.
I'm considering other options for automated notifications anyway- it's not really ideal right now.
I've been colocating my own server hardware in the UK for the last 15-20 years now. Moved providers a few times, currently at Mythic Beasts. I like having lots of CPU and RAM available to me, having the control of taking my hardware elsewhere. Currently have a 1U AMD AM5 machine - 12 cores, 24 threads & 128GB of RAM. Add in a bunch of SSDs and it still just about fits into 120W under load.
I use it to host my own email, sites, and a bunch of other services.
fastmail and migadu are mentioned elsewhere in the thread, which i use for email (fastmail→migadu, for price reasons only). both are fantastic bordering on perfect, with fastmail being a bit more "slick" on the interface side.
for managed hosting like dreamhost's "shared", nearlyfreespeech.net served me extremely well, they would be my first recommendation to anyone after that level of managed service.
people are weighing in with vps recommendations and more self-managed hosting, so i'll go bat for fly.io which i use to push my ops activity as close to zero as i can. i don't have or manage any servers now. for my static websites (several sites in each of two containers) i just throw an nginx container at them with my static files injected and a small app config saying "0.5 vcpu, 256mb ram, 0 disk", and it handles the rest. it gets exposed at app-name.fly.dev, you point a dns record to it, done. tls certs can then be requested for the domain and applied (and renewed) automatically. deploys are versioned and can be rolled back, and disks/volume (if they are needed and used) are snapshot daily automatically which has saved me from my own incompetence twice last year.
i really like fly. it gives me enough control without any of the responsibilities that go along with it.
Somewhat boring (and maybe even overpriced), but I’m relying on a mixture of AWS for compute and Cloudflare R2 for storage. I'm using them for email hosting, Firezone gateways, and as a mirror for self-hosted services in case of an outage (off-grid). Other providers either don’t offer FreeBSD images (or custom ISOs for NanoBSD), or they block your account to demand a photo of your passport—just to verify you're not a robot after years of use (looking at you, Hetzner).
For email, I've been using paid plan on Zoho mail for several years. For the low price, its been quite rock solid. The only caveat is that while some web stuff like their webmail, web access calendar, etc are totally fine...they do suffer from a few performance issues every once in a while. But, then wait a couple of days, and i assume they must do another release, and tends to get addressed. The other minor issue is that while they have no ads for non-Zoho stuff - being a paid plan - the banners that they do show are for their own Zoho events, other services, etc....The ads are really unobtrusive especially considering the low cost...but that might bother some people, so mentioned it. Of course, the way to avoid both of these very minor issues is to avoid using their web clients, and simply use mobile or desktop clients like Thunderbird, etc....and then performance is really good.
If ever i do decide to leave Zoho (which is not in my plan at this time), then i'd likely go to fastmail since their reputation is so well and highly regarded - even though pricing is bit higher than zoho.
As far as web hosting, I've long been a customer of Digital Ocean VPS hosts...and while DO is ok, i'm not a fan of their pricing - especially the small sized VPS instances that i tend to use for the last several years. their pricing has really crept up over the years more than i would like. Other than pricing, i have no complaints about DO...but over the last year, i have experiemented with Hetzner - for cost savings...and Hetzner is ok. The costs are waaaaay better than DO...and while there have been a little mini outage or 2 here or there....i think i will be migrating all my stuff away from DO and all into Hetzner. Most of the stuff i host is simple static sites (that i suppose i could easily host elsehwere like github pages, etc.), and small toy apps....so with such simplicity i can pivot in many directions...but for now I'm planning to migrate to Hetzner (away from DO).
Also, for some full blown apps - let's say nextcloud, etc. - i am considering which ones i can host at home (behind something like tailscale)...Because I'd have more horsepower on a mini PC at home...and user base would be just my small family. The apps I'd self-host at home would need to be something that if went down, would not be as impactful to life...so an outage of a day or so (due to unexpected home power outage) should be allowable...but for essential services like email, nope that gets paid for and managed by someone else. I'm trying to balance what i pay for, and what i do on my own and for which essential and non-essential services. ;-)
For domain name registrar, i've long used namecheap...but their pricing seems to have ballooned a bit over the last few recent years. So, last year I started experimenting with porkbun...and wow! I now have plan to migrate fully away from namecheap towards porkbun. I should clarify that i never had any issues with namecheap...it is merely a cost savings thing. But, with the number of domains names that i have registered, migrating towards porkbun makes a sizable difference in costs for me.
I've also been using free tier at cloudflare for several years. Basically, while domains are registered at either namecheap (for now) or porkbun, the DNS stuff is handled by cloudflare. I've had no issues with cloudflare; they really are great from ops, performance perspective, etc.! While i respect them as a company, at the same time, i also have some misgivings merely because they feel like they're part of "big tech"...and I'd like to stay away from big tech as much as possible. So, not sure where i would move if i left cloudflare....but have no formal plans to leave them. I suppose the more apps that i move to self-host at home (and place behind something like tailscale, etc.), then the less need i have for cloudflare...and as noted for non-app stuff like static websites, i have plenty of other options to review and migrate towards. But, cloudflare so far has been good for me...so no exit for now.
I have a super cheap VPS at https://contabo.com/en/ that I run most stuff on.
As for their service, they're heavily cost-optimized and it shows, let's keep it at that. I'm a happy customer because you can't beat their price but you may find many things lacking. In particular, I've heard reports that they heavily oversubscribe I/O in particular, leading to awful disk access speeds if you're unlucky. For my modest needs it's been just fine though.
I use fast mail. They're great. They also have nice migration utilities from the company that has the blue logo that I won't name, as well as the company that has the rainbow label that that I won't name.
For my site, it's just static pages made by Hugo, so I end up uploading them to AWS S3, where they're served by CloudFront. I also host my DNS in AWS, not for any particular reason, just nice to have those two interfaces in one place. I could theoretically host anywhere, but I wanted a reason to learn AWS.
I just recently started exploring Pikapods for more app-type things. I used to host them myself on Hetzner, but I didn't like having to screw around with the maintenance overhead. Loved how nice Hetzner was, for the most part, though.
Static web: AWS S3 behind AWS Cloudfront. Pennies per month. Built via a script on my VPS. Dynamic web: Oracle Always Free Tier. I lucked out and got one of their beefy 4CPU 24GB RAM 200GB disk ARM64 machines, and it is actually $0.00/mo, even has a static IPv4 address. It's Fine™️, someone with more principles might want to pay money to a company that doesn't hate its customers, tho it certainly is nice to have a machine this large.
I know nothing about email, other answers probably have more advice.
I was a shared web hosting user between 2007 and 2013 for my first websites, but since 2013, moved all the stuff to a VPS in a Ukrainian data center. The main aim of the move was just to get more system administration skills - how to run and secure Apache/NGINX, MySQL/MariaDB, BIND, Exim/Postfix, and some sort of security tools like Fail2Ban. Later, in 2015 or 2016, moved my blog to an EC2 in AWS, again - to get more practice in cloud provider administration.
For now, my blogs are living in DigitalOcean, but recently I finished setting up my home lab with a ThinkCentre running FreeBSD and ZFS with mirror on two SSDs, so I'm planning to move my personal blog and monitoring to this host. But the main blog will be kept running on DigitalOcean, connected with WireGuard to the home FreeBSD for backups.
For the email, first it was hosted also on the shared web hosting, then on VPS, but later and until now, on Google, mainly because of strong anti-spam protection.
Ah, and I recalled my "unix way" - systems, used during all these migrations: first, 2007-2013, FreeBSD; later, CentOS; then after ~2018, Debian. And now I'm using FreeBSD again for the home lab and thinking about using it for my main blog in DigitalOcean or AWS.
Adding to the chorus: +1 for Fastmail and NearlyFreeSpeech.
I mostly use VM's for boring personal things I self-host from https://tornadovps.com/ (formerly prgmr) because I don't need (or want) a big hosting provider and they don't treat me like an idiot. I've used https://mxroute.com/ for some email for similar reasons.
I currently use Linode for my personal VPS, and I'm planning to move to OVH once they have a VPS available a few milliseconds away. DNS is currently on Cloudflare, which seemed like a good idea a few years ago, not sure now.
I also want to explore proxying to my humble k3s cluster of Raspberry Pis (Pies?) via proxyprotol over WireGuard.
I have a Kimsufi server at OVHcloud, it's a dedicated server with a 4 core Xeon E5-1620, 32 GB RAM, 120GB SSD storage, and 500Mbps bandwidth for 10 euros a month, which is pretty great value for money. The storage isn't big, but I can rent an instance with more if I need it, it's sufficient for now. When I started writing this I thought it was hosted in Amsterdam, but apparently it's in France somewhere.
Mail: Fastmail, using my own domain.
Website: Built with Hugo, hosted by the Cloudflare Workers platform (was on Cloudflare Pages until CF decided to start semi-deprecating CFP in favor of CFW).
Happy TornadoVPS user here ( https://tornadovps.com/order/main/packages/xen/?group_id=10) I use them to host ubuntu (a couple of servers with various configurations). They have *BSD support as well.
I've used several generations of the small "Dedicated Server" at ARP Networks for nearly 15 years to host email, web stuff, and a general small presence outside of my home. They've all run FreeBSD, just rolled the latest one up to FreeBSD 15.
I've been thrilled to be there, no significant problems and the few minor bumps have been dealt with quickly and easily.
$work -> we have piles of bespoke datacenters
$personal -> interserver.net for compute/serving, AWS for DNS (mostly), rsync.net for backups, gsuite for gsuite