Happy launch of the redesigned version of https://mfh-elsalvador.org! Outside of my personal web projects for fun, this is the first real-world, production website that I host on a DigitalOcean Linux-based virtual machine, also known as Droplet in the DigitalOcean world. That is in other words, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that is functionally equivalent to a dedicated physical server where a single website is hosted on it.
The above does not mean that a DigitalOcean Droplet cannot host multiple websites on a single server. It means that hosting more than one website on a Droplet is optional. For example, if using Apache as the web server, Virtual Hosts can be used for one Apache instance to serve multiple websites, each with its own domain. Apache takes care of redirecting visitors of each domain, to the specific folder that stores each website’s information.
In an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model such as the architecture provided by DigitalOcean Droplets, I find that hosting websites on dedicated servers in the form of a VPS become affordable or at least, significantly less expensive than renting an equivalent dedicated server from a web hosting company selling under the platform as a service (PaaS) model. In this equation though, I am not considering the cost of hiring the developer(s) with the technical skills to properly install and configure the server from scratch.
I definitely recommend DigitalOcean's cloud hosting services for developers.