I have used quite a few but my favourite has always been dedicated servers (just look at companies that are closest to you/your users and within your budget).

I would love to have my own data-centre as I have often toyed with buying my own servers and co-locating, but cost-wise it’s not that far off just renting dedicated servers. Own data-centre would be awesome.

I use Hetzner. I especially like their price/performance ratio and stability (never had a downtime)

DigitalOcean, in comparison, is way more expensive than Hetzner and less reliable

For deployment, managing databases, backups and apps I use self-hosted PaaS dokku.com , which allows me to deploy projects in different languages using Heroku-alike buildpacks (but isn’t limited to that, according to docs)

personal 20$ referral link

In fairness that is not a fair comparison, because all hosting providers can suffer from hardware failure at any moment in time, and this is a fact without any exception.

It’s up to us to have an effective backup system for the servers we run, and one that’s different from the hosting provider.

Even the author of the post acknowledges that:

Think about this for a minute: what are you going to do when one of your servers would disappear right now? I hope you take away from this story that you should always backup your servers. A hardware failure can happen at any given moment. Do not solely rely on backups from your own provider. Take your own backups as well. Use tools like BackupPC, Bacula, or a service like SnapShooter.