[imaginenore]

Cheap: browse through the listings on lowendbox.com, you will find some amazing deals for both VPS and dedicated servers.

Reliable: AWS / Rackspace / DigitalOcean / Google cloud / basically any famous one.

When you're starting, it's probably better to rent a cheap VPS server. If you start growing fast, you can always move to the cloud. But modern cheap VPSs are quite powerful. I have 7 websites running on one that costs me $6/month.

[badsock]

Has DigitalOcean gotten better for reliability? I took my company off of them about 2 years ago specifically because of their frequent downtime.

[iurisilvio]

I have around 20-30 instances there and it is a long time since the last fail.

In the past it failed a lot (~1 instance completely fail per month), but I think it is better now.

[imaginenore]

I haven't dealt with them in a while, but most of the feedback I read about them is great.

[colinbartlett]

I've been using for more than 2 years with 100% uptime.

[akoncius]

yeah, in last couple of years I cannot remember anything really bad in DO. Biggest issue in DO was slower performance of storage, but after complaining to support about it, it was fixed and everything was fine there.

[carlesfe]

Seconding this. It's been my experience exactly.

[sixhobbits]

Curious, what's your definition of "the cloud"? Under mine, running off a cheap vps is very representative of "running in the cloud". What would the "move to the cloud" entail? Do you mean using more services such as lambda, S3, or a database as a service platform as opposed to doing this "manually" by installing software on a clean OS?

For me: buying a rack/dedicated machine is the "traditional" (though increasingly rare) option and running off a vps is "in the cloud"

[imaginenore]

To me the cloud means you can start an instance with an API call.

[ZenoArrow]

As a 'best of both worlds' option you could use a free tier on one (or more) of the cloud hosts. As far as I'm aware OpenShift, AWS and Azure all offer free tiers. Combine that with a CDN with a free tier like CloudFlare and free SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt and you could be looking at a very low cost to start out (just the domain name cost).