Digital Ocean

A few things make Digital Ocean stand out as a hosting provider:

1. A very comprehensive tutorial section. E.g. How to configure nginx as a web server and reverse proxy for apache on a single Ubuntu instance.
2. Digital Ocean is "Ansible-friendly" because there is a core module in Ansible for interfacing with the Digital Ocean API
3. Very interesting ability to use their API, with not only Ansible, but also their "User Data" endpoint. This can be used to make "config scripts" for initial server setup. For more about the User Data endpoints of the API, see https://developers.digitalocean.com/documentation/metadata/
4. The API is available as programming-language specific libraries for just about every popular programming language. So for example, you can use the PHP library to use the DO API in your PHP application.
5. They offer SSD block storage that you can attach to your host, so if you need a relatively low-power machine but you also need 1TB of disk, you can do that.

Application Programming Interface

PHP is the HyperText Preprocessor = the most popular programming language for the web