Author Archives: Kevin Ohashi

About Kevin Ohashi

Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.

How to Backup/Export Your MySql Database(s)

I will teach you two ways to backup/export your mysql database(s). The first option is using phpMyAdmin; phpMyAdmin is generally installed on most shared hosting and is bundled with cPanel. The second method is SSH; this requires SSH access (often found on VPS/Dedicated servers).

Backing Up Your Database With phpMyAdmin

Login to your phpMyAdmin. If you are using cPanel, it has its own icon on the dashboard when you login.
Click on the database you want to backup/export.
You should see a screen like this:
Click on the Export tab at the top.

The default options are generally good. It will save both your schema (database design) and data (database content). However, if the database is large, you probably want to choose 'Save as a File' and pick a compression type (zip/gzip). This will let you download the file and have it take less space. If it's small and you just want the code directly, don't change this.

If you want to import the data, just click the import tab (instead of export) and upload the file.

Backing Up Your Database With SSH

We are going to use mysqldump which comes with mysql.

Login to your server via SSH.
Type in the following command replacing YOURUSER, YOURPASSWORD and YOURDATABASE with your mysql username, mysql password and the database you want to backup. Also change /path/to/output/file.sql to the location you want to save the backup.

mysqldump –quick –user=YOURUSERNAME –password=YOURPASSWORD YOURDATABASE < /path/to/output/file.sql

If you want to backup all your databases instead of a specific database, replace YOURDATABASE with –all-databases

Once the command finishes running, your backup is in the .sql file you specified.

If you want to automate backups of your database, there is a nifty MySql backup to Amazon's S3 file storage script here: https://github.com/woxxy/MySQL-backup-to-Amazon-S3

Understanding Unlimited Web Hosting

We have all seen the advertisement. Unlimited Web Hosting. For a few dollars a month you get everything. It sounds great, right?

What are Unlimited Hosting Plans Really Offering?

Unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth are the two things generally covered by unlimited plans. You sometimes see other things such as email accounts, mysql databases, and more; but that's not very important for this article because they are dependent on disk space.

Does this sound too good to be true?

There is no such thing as an unlimited size disk drive and no network connection with unlimited speed (and therefore bandwidth). There are physical constraints, hard drives are a certain size and network connections only go so fast. So in a sense, it is too good to be true. Most of these companies are overselling their services. That means they know how many resources an average customer uses and puts as many customers as they can on a single server to minimize costs. The reality is that most customers use very few resources. For the customers that do use a lot of resources, they hide limits in the terms of service.

Common Limits Hidden in Terms of Service:

iNode limitations – This is the number of files you can have on your server. Unlimited disk space, but limited number of files.
CPU limitations – Hosts generally say you can't use more than your fair share of the CPU. If your site gets a substantial amount of traffic, it is likely that the CPU usage will be dramatically higher too and they will pull the plug or ask you to pay more.
Memory limitations – This is similar to CPU limitations, when you get a lot of visitors, your website will generally increase memory (RAM) usage.
Content Restrictions – Hosts often disallow file hosting, backups and many other types of content. File hosting is a pretty ambiguous term because everything on the server is a file.
Suspend you for any reason – This is a catch-all for unprofitable customers. Using too much of their resources? Goodbye.

Are All Unlimited Hosts Bad Then?

No. They vary like any other type of company. Some are better than others. If you plan on using a lot of resources though, you will probably be kicked off or asked to upgrade, generally to a VPS which dedicates resources specifically to your website.

Just be aware unlimited does have limitations, but they are really designed to keep the users who would use unlimited resources out. Most customers don't fit that profile. But once you've decided you're not really going to need unlimited resources, it's worth comparing web hosts on other dimensions.

Graph of Web Hosting Ratings at Review Signal Since Launch

Happy Staturday!

I didn't quite finish porting the D3 / Rickshaw version of this to WordPress, so that users can explore the data themselves. So that will probably be next Staturday. However, I wanted to share a preview visualizing how the rankings at Review Signal have changed over time.

A few interesting points are this month, August 2013, you can see the four major EIG brands we track drop (BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster, JustHost). We see WPEngine come down to mortal levels. We see the rise of DigitalOcean. I will do a more thorough investigation when the interactive chart gets published.

[Click Graph to Enlarge]

Meet The Host: SiteGround

This is the first post in our Meet The Host series. The idea is to let consumers see both the human side as well as the hardware side of the web hosting businesses through pictures.

Meet SiteGround (Website | Reviews)

SiteGround was founded in 2004. Today, it has 100 employees and over 250,000 domain names hosted. SiteGround also has three data centers in Chicago, Amsterdam and Singapore where their customers websites are hosted.

Quote from the Host:

What really makes the difference is our unique team and company culture. I am extremely proud to be part of a team that I can openly call a family - coming to the office doesn’t feel like coming to work, but coming to see friends with which we do fantastic things together. Everyone is extremely helpful, knowledgeable and highly professional. Besides enjoying our great office, we also spend time together at company supported vacations, teambuilding and office parties.

- Tina Kesova, SiteGround

Photo Gallery:

The SiteGround office features open space, modern and relaxing atmosphere with more than 50 square feet of space per employee to foster creativity.

This is where the technical masterminds live - the corner that hosts SiteGround software operations and senior support engineers.

The software developers work closely with the customer service teams to implement client feature requests.

SiteGround crew are real beer lovers too. A rare beer collection decorates the devs corner.

The SiteGround HQ has 7 conference rooms to host meetings, trainings or day-to-day brainstorming sessions and welcome company partners and guests.

Half of the SiteGround office is a big recreation area where SG folks play different kinds of games to relax and build even further the great team spirit that makes SiteGround what it really is – one of the friendliest hosting companies!

The game and recreation area allows people to play foosball, table tennis, darts, pool table, and more.

SiteGround invests in the education and professional growth of their employees and provides free books and a library area where SG team members can sit down and read in a quiet area.

The SiteGround team knows how to party and never misses a chance to get together and celebrate big company milestones. Then, the office becomes a party corner that can even host casino games.

Each year the company organizes a teambuilding where all employees get together in informal surroundings to build further the team spirit.

Working hard, partying hard! Besides building reliable hosting platforms and climbing high peaks at teambuildings, the SiteGround people know how to have fun together.

Amsterdam Data Center - A power distribution unit (PDU) and a standard row of cabinets, full of SiteGround servers.

Chicago Data Center - The Chicago datacenter is organized into computer rooms like this, each one being about 30,000 square feet in size. The SiteGround servers reside in rooms like this one.

Singapore Data Center - The Singapore layouts are designed to allow the most dense population on the row possible, while ensuring rack power availability allows for full failover.

Singapore Data Center - Redundant APC power strips provide power to SiteGround dual-path servers.

A large thank you goes to Tina at SiteGround who helped collect and caption the photos for this post. I hope you enjoyed our first edition of our Meet The Host series.

Long Running Processes in PHP

Here at Review Signal, I use a lot of PHP code and one of the challenges is getting PHP to run for long periods of time.

Here are two sample problems that I deal with at Review Signal that require PHP processes to run for long periods of time or indefinitely:

Data processing – Every night Review Signal crunches millions of pieces of data to update our rankings.
Twitter Streaming API data – this requires a constant connection to the Twitter API to receive messages as they are posted on Twitter

The Tools

One of the best things as of PHP 5 is CLI (Command Line Interface). PHP CLI allows you to run things directly from the command line and doesn't have a time limit built in. All the pains of set_time_limit() and playing with php.ini disappear.

If you're going to be working from the command line, you're probably going to need to learn a little bit of bash scripting.

Finally, we will use cron (crontab / cron jobs)

SSH vs Cron Jobs

I need to explain that when you run something from a ssh session it is different from when you setup a cronjob to run something for you. An SSH session can be a good place to test scripts and run one-time processes. While a cronjob is the right way to setup a script you want run regularly.

If I write this line into my SSH session

php myscript.php

It will execute myscript.php. However, my terminal will be locked up until it completes.

You can get around this by holding ctrl+z (pauses the execution) and then type 'bg' (backgrounds the process).

For longer running processes, this can be nice, but if you lose your SSH session, it will terminate execution.

You can get around this by using the nohup (no hangup) command.

nohup php myscript.php

nohup allows execution to continue even if you lose the session. So if you use nohup, and then background the process it will finish executing regardless of your SSH session's status.
All of this only matters if you are running things manually from the command line. If you are running scripts with some regularity and using cronjobs, then you do not need to worry about these issues. Since the server itself is executing them, the SSH terminal sessions don't matter.

Update: A few readers reminded me that you can add an ampersand (&) to the end a command to background it immediately. This avoids having to ctrl+z, bg.

nohup php myscript.php &

Sometimes, you make a mistake and run a process without nohup but want it to continue running even if your SSH session disconnects. I've run scripts late at night thinking they would be quick, only to find out they took a lot longer than expected and I had to go home. This trick allows you to run the script as a daemon, so it won't terminate upon SSH session ending.

ctrl+z to stop (pause) the program and get back to the shell
bg to run it in the background
disown -h [job-spec] where [job-spec] is the job number (like %1 for the first running job; find about your number with the jobs command) so that the job isn't killed when the terminal closes

Credit to user Node on StackOverflow

Data Processing with PHP

Since I run this script regularly, I create a bash script which is executed by a cron job.

Example bash script which actually runs the PHP script:

#!/bin/sh
php /path/to/script.php

Example cron job:

0 0 23 * * /bin/sh /path/to/bashscript.sh

If you don't know where to put the code above, type 'crontab -e' to edit your cron table and save it. The 0 0 23 * * tells it run when the time is 0 seconds, 0 minutes, 23 hours on any day, any day of the week.

So now we have a basic script which will run every night at 11pm. It doesn't matter how long it will take to execute, it will simply start every night at that time and run until it's finished.

Twitter Streaming API

The second problem is more interesting because the PHP script needs to be running to collect data. I want it running all the time. So I have a php script (thank you to Phirehose library) which keeps an open connection to the Twitter API but I can't rely on it to always be running. The server may restart, the script may error out, or other problems could occur.

So my solution has been to create a bash script to make sure the process is running. And if it isn't running, run it.

#!/bin/sh
 
ps aux | grep '[m]yScript.php'
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
    php /path/to/myScript.php
fi

Line by line explanation:

#!/bin/sh

So we start with our path to the shell.

ps aux | grep '[m]yScript.php'

process list is piped (|) to grep which searches for '[m]yScript.php'. I use the [m] regular expression matching so it doesn't match itself. Grep will spawn a process with myScript.php in the command, so it will always find a result if you search without putting something in brackets.

if [ $? -ne 0]

This checks the last command's return value. So if nothing was returned by searching our process list for [m]yScript.php

then
    php /path/to/myScript.php
fi

These lines are executed if our php script isn't found running. It runs our php script. The conditional is then terminated with fi.

Now, we create a cron job that executes the script above:

* * * * * /bin/sh runsForever.sh

So now we have a system that checks every minute to see if myScript.php is running. If it isn't running, it starts it.

Conclusion

You will notice the Twitter streaming script is just a more advanced version of the data processing. Both of the working versions have a lot more things going on in my live scripts but are beyond the scope of this article. If you are interested in extending them, you may want to look into logging as a first step. What I've learned from years of hands-on practice is that this setup can and does work. I've run php processes for many months on this configuration.

WordPress + Nginx + Uploads = 413 Request Entity Too Large

Happy WordPress Wednesday! The day of the week dedicated to talking about WordPress.

Or sad, if you had to deal with the problem I ran into today while working on our WordPress blog. I wanted to upload some larger pictures and got a cryptic 'HTTP Error'.

Let me explain the architecture I am running here so that this makes sense. I run Nginx as a reverse proxy and caching server in front of Apache. Nginx forwards traffic to apache when it needs to and serves everything from memory when it doesn't (which is incredibly fast).

Back onto the problem, the error message isn't helpful. I did what I normally do, look at the error log. I didn't see anything in the apache log or the nginx log.

What I did discover was by opening Chrome's developer tools and watching the Network tab I could see the file uploads were failing. They were red and had a status code of 413: Request Entity too Large.

Now I know my httpd.conf (Apache's config file) was set to accept files as big as these images.

So now I had to look at the nginx.conf. What I discovered was nginx's default setting is 1 megabyte. So I added this line to my http configuration within nginx:

client_max_body_size 20m;

According to the documentation you can put it in http, server, and location.

A quick

service nginx restart

And all was well in the world.

How to Deal With Web Hosting Failures and Outages

First off, it sucks. I am sorry that you have to go through the ordeal of downtime and web hosting failures.

There are a couple of facts about web hosting companies that everyone needs to realize:

1. Every web host has failures, given enough time. None are perfect.

2. Given 1, that doesn't mean every web host is the same. Some do better than others in handling situations. Different people will feel differently about how well a situation was handled, not everyone will be pleased. But in general, some companies handle failures better than others.

What happens after a failure

The company almost always apologizes. Sometimes they give their customers some type of compensation, often in the form of credit or payment forgiveness. Anything less than an apology should be an immediate warning sign.

Customers are then faced with a big decision.

Do you want to remain a customer of this company?

Some people will ditch the web host no matter what, given a good enough reason. Some will be locked in because of long term contracts or budgets. Some will be wondering what the future performance of the company will be like: was this a one off or a pattern? Everyone will make their own evaluations on these issues. People will see this outage differently. Choosing the right web hosting company is a personal decision. No web host is perfect for everyone.

I have a unique insight given the data I track here at Review Signal. My full time job is analyzing web hosting companies and what people think of them. I've watched multiple major outages and problems across different companies.

What generally happens is called regression to the mean. Simply put, the companies generally return to their pre-failure/outage service quality.

GoDaddy had a major DNS outage in September 2012. You can see a clear drop in rating and increased negative sentiment during and for a couple days after the event. However, within a week, things appear to be back to normal, their long-term overall rating is just under 50%.

HostGator experienced a major outage in August 2013. We can see a huge decrease in rating and a massive spike in the number of negative messages. However, within days, HostGator was receiving ratings above 60%, they were 62% before the crash.

That doesn't mean every company will always regress back to the mean. Failures and outages can often be signs of systemic or worsening problems. There are sometimes signs that you can look for to determine if this is something that simply happens or perhaps a sign of things to come. Here is a non-exhaustive list of potential warning signs:

Management Changes
Ownership changes
Degrading Service Quality (eg. slower response times, less knowledgeable customer service representatives)
New / Different Infrastructure
New / Different Software

So you still want to move or at least consider other options?

There are a lot of hosting companies out there. There are probably some even cheaper, there are some that have better reputations in different areas, there are some that might suit you better than your current provider. It's sometimes a good idea to look around just to make sure you're getting the best value.

When choosing a new web host people generally consider one of two options: asking friends or reading reviews. If you have a friend who knows the web hosting industry and you trust them to give you a good recommendation, that's often a good place to start. If you like reviews and trust a lot of opinions more than one person's opinion then finding reviews can be a better option.

I am biased here and I want to be upfront about that. This site (Review Signal) is a webhosting review site that works by tracking the opinions people share publicly on social media. That's where I get my data and insights, watching and reading all the recommendations and complaints against most of the major players in the web hosting space. All of the data we collect is published for free and available here. Each review is linked to the original posting source so you can verify it, or even reach out to that person if you really want. Review Signal's goal is to be the most honest and transparent review site in the industry and has more than 150,000 reviews (or ~100 times more than any of our competitors).

That said, there are other venues that you can look at too. Web Hosting Talk is the largest web hosting forum and has years of people talking about different companies. There is a ton of great information there and it's a great place for people interested in learning about web hosting as a business.

What should I be concerned about when looking for a new host?

There are a lot of considerations but I will list some of the major ones:

1. What do you need? The primary constraints of any site are software, hardware (disk space, cpu, memory/ram), and bandwidth. Unlimited sounds nice, but nothing is really unlimited and you don't need unlimited. Most sites don't need much at all. WordPress is only a few megabytes to put this into perspective. A high resolution photo is generally a few megabytes. Realistic goals and expectations can help make for a better hosting experience.

2. How do you expect to be supported when things go wrong or you need help? There are two primary categories of hosting: managed and unmanaged. Managed hosting means the provider manages the server for you and takes care of things like security updates and software updates. Please note this is on the server side, generally not the software you install yourself. When your server goes down, they fix it. Unmanaged hosting makes you responsible for doing these things. Most people aren't comfortable with that, but some are. If you decide you need managed, look at things like how you can get support: is it ticket system only? What about telephone? Is it 24/7? Test out the support. Try calling/emailing and asking a question. Was it fast? Easy? Did you like talking to the person? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you are going to be really pissed off when you're a customer and actually have a real problem. Maybe that company isn't right for you.

3. How much should I spend on hosting? There is no right amount. You should be asking yourself two questions, how much can I afford and makes sense? How much is what I am running on my website worth? If you have an online business making $1,000/day running on a $3/month hosting plan with poor support, you might want to re-think your plan. If you run a personal blog for fun with cat pictures you found on reddit and your mom is your only visitor, $3/month might be the right amount to spend on it (no offense to all the cat picture websites, the internet needs more of you <3 and take this cat picture offering).

4. There is no best host. Hosting companies are good at different things. Some specialize in very specific types of hosting and services while others are the best at being cheap. It really depends what you want and how you want to make trade-offs.

Conclusion

I tried to include some basic guidelines and help here for anyone considering the issues around a major catastrophe at a web hosting company. Not every situation is covered and getting specific help and recommendations is sometimes necessary. I am happy to answer any questions people might have and help any/all of you to the best of my ability. Please use our Talk to a Web Hosting Expert form to get started. If you are just interested in reading reviews, I suggest taking a look at our big list of providers, ratings and data available on our compare web hosting providers page.

Good luck and I hope this has helped!

-Kevin Ohashi

This post was inspired by the EIG outage [covered here 1, 2] and a comment I wrote on Mashable discussing the outage.

Photo credit: Nathan Reed.

Post Mortem of the EIG Outage (August 2, 2013) That Affected BlueHost, HostGator, JustHost and HostMonster

I first wrote about EIG's major outage as it was occurring and had to speculate on a few things before I had the data to support those guesses. This post is a more complete picture of what happened.

Recap

EIG had a major outage on August 2, 2013 that lasted for many hours because core switches in their Provo, Utah datacenter failed. This failure caused customers of BlueHost, HostGator, JustHost and HostMonster to be taken offline.

I speculated as to what would occur after the outage. How would the brands of the affected companies be perceived after such a catastrophic failure? I looked for a comparable event: the GoDaddy DNS outage in September 2012. What I observed from that event was a very quick return to normal volumes of messages and sentiment. GoDaddy regressed to the mean.

GoDaddy

The charts I used in my original post were lacking. I didn't have time to really collect and analyze all the data, especially sentiment. I could eyeball the historical data and see the ratings bounced back to their original levels but it wasn't a granular look.

This chart shows the actual outage, tweet volume and sentiment. It's immediately clear that negative sentiment has a huge spike. I also suspect that a lot of the positive messages are actually mis-categorized; Review Signal isn't perfect and things like sarcasm are one of the hardest things for the sentiment analysis algorithms to categorize. The unusual volume lasts three days and then quickly drops back to a normal looking pattern with perhaps a slightly higher baseline volume. The actual rating goes back to hovering around 50%, which GoDaddy's long-term graph hovers around as well.

Let's get back to the EIG outage and the affected brands. I am only going to talk about two of the brands, BlueHost and HostGator, in this post because on a granular level, the other two, HostMonster and JustHost, didn't have enough data. The brands without enough data will take more time to develop a clear picture about the effects of the outage.

BlueHost

bluehost_sentiment

I was wrong. So far at least. BlueHost had an overall rating of 57% before August 2. It hasn't broken 50% since the outage. BlueHost did not, or has not yet, regressed back to the mean. What's interesting is that the volume of tweets about BlueHost's outage was more than double in quantity to the similar GoDaddy outage, but they both quickly dropped back to normal volume within days of the event.

I will explore this a bit more, but to do that I need to show you the other brand.

HostGator

HostGator's outage looks almost identical to GoDaddy's outage. Around 1000 negative messages on the day of the outage and back to normal within days. HostGator appears to have regressed to the mean as quickly as GoDaddy, its rating has been over 60% two days, which are pre-crash levels, where its average rating was 62%. HostGator behaved exactly as I predicted.

Weird Conclusions and Speculations

Why hasn't BlueHost regress to the mean? One explanation, which I was alerted to by a kind reader (Thanks Linda!), is that not all of HostGator's customers were in the Provo, UT data center. So the outage may have disproportionately affected BlueHost customers compared to HostGator customers. BlueHost is also the larger hosting company by number of customers, although not domain count.

That explanation may explain the volume difference, but I don't think it explains the regression to the mean for one brand and not the other. Presumably the affected customers of both brands should be equally upset. Those lingering feelings should last equally long for both groups of customers.

I can't explain why we haven't seen BlueHost regress, but I can point out a few differences between this outage and the GoDaddy comparison which may be factors. One important factor is duration. GoDaddy's outage lasted 4-5 hours according to reports. The EIG outage lasted from the morning of August 2 until 9 PM. They were reporting 'intermittent instability' into August 3 according to their official website.

I could speculate that the combination of severity, duration and size of the affected brand has caused some sort of more permanent brand damage to BlueHost, but I think that's premature. BlueHost hasn't regressed yet, but I still think it will eventually. A company that large, with such a huge brand and marketing infrastructure will probably recover. I will be watching BlueHost carefully for the next few weeks or months along with the smaller brands to see if it happens. If it doesn't, this will be an interesting case study in branding, communication and perhaps social media.

Thank you for reading and if you have any ideas, feedback or suggestions please leave them in the comments below.

Service Interrupted: A Look at the EIG (BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster, JustHost) Outage through Twitter

I woke up today and quickly found out that one of the major players in the hosting space was having a massive outage. According to their own blog:

During the morning of August 2, 2013, Endurance International Group’s data center in Provo, UT experienced unexpected issues that impacted customers of bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster and JustHost. Company websites and some phone services were affected as well.

That sounds bad. Really bad. But how bad? Let's take a look at the data:

It's pretty clear that today was an outlier. A major outlier for all the affected companies.

Our data collection system here at Review Signal collected over 35,000 tweets today alone about these four companies. That is roughly 14 times the normal amount.

Interestingly enough, there are some very understanding customers out there too, it wasn't all negative.

How has it affected their rankings?

I must first note that most messages don't make it through our spam filtering systems for a variety of reasons. So despite there being over 35,000 tweets, we did not get 35,000 new reviews. Many of the messages were not up to our quality standards, eg. retweets, spam, duplicate messages and news. If you are interested in learning more about how we calculate scores and what kinds of messages count see our How It Works section.

BlueHost

I am not sure why, but BlueHost was impacted a lot more than it's bigger brother HostGator. BlueHost has 1.9 million domains on their server. They also received over 15,000 tweets about them today (50% more than HostGator).

BlueHost was rated at 57% (Overall Rating) from over two years worth of data collected. Today they dropped 8% to 49%. There were over 1,500 negative reviews today (Note: Our data was calculated early to write this article, the day isn't fully over yet).

HostGator

HostGator is the largest of the bunch and has 2.15 million domains under management. They seemed to have fared the storm better than their brothers with less tweets about them in absolute number and relative to their size.

HostGator was rated at 62% (Overall Rating) and dropped 5% to 57%. HostGator received approximately 700 negative reviews today.

HostMonster and JustHost

These are the babies of the bunch, HostMonster has 'only' 700,000 domainso and JustHost has barely over 350,000.

HostMonster went from a 56% (Overall Rating) to 48%, which is a 8% decline. JustHost dropped from 46% to 41%, a total of 5%.

Conclusion

Today was a pretty awful day for all the companies above but some were affected more than others. I don't have any answer as to why that might be. There are many plausible theories such as perhaps there were more BlueHost customers in the Provo, UT data center than the other companies. But without further information, it's only speculation. UPDATE: I was told BlueHost actually has more customers than HostGator, even if HostGator customers have more domainers. A simple explanation as to why BlueHost was impacted more.

What I can say is a major screw up definitely impacts a company's reputation. But large companies seem to regress to the mean.

GoDaddy is a good comparison. They had a major DNS outage around September 11-12. It left a noticeable dip on the overall rating but it seemed to bounce back. February's dip is the super bowl effect that brings a lot of attention to them (more negative than positive, but attention nonetheless). The long-term volume of tweets also doesn't appear to be affected after a few days.

If we use GoDaddy as a benchmark, these companies will probably be back to their usual levels of service within a week, but today and the next couple days will leave a very long term impact on their rating at Review Signal.

Introducing Digital Ocean – Low Cost SSD VPS Provider

We are happy to announce Digital Ocean has been added to Review Signal today.

Read our 1,200+ Digital Ocean Reviews or use Promo Code SSDTWTTR to get $10 Free Credit.

Digital Ocean is a relatively new provider in the cloud vps hosting space and has skyrocketed in popularity (over 5,000% in the past six months!). It seems that their explosive growth is backed up by the data we've collected. Digital Ocean has an overall rating of 81% at the this time. That's the highest rated web hosting company on Review Signal at the time of writing.

As of yesterday, Digital Ocean has opened up a second data center in New York (NY2) and now offers San Franciso, New York and Amsterdam as locations. Their plans start at $5/month for a 512MB (RAM) and 20GB SSD of space.

Congratulations and welcome to Digital Ocean!