DO is more comparable to AWS than GoDaddy. Essentially a VPS provider is someone who rents you a server instance on a much larger server running other instance

DO is more comparable to AWS than GoDaddy. Essentially a VPS provider is someone who rents you a server instance on a much larger server running other instances of other people's servers. You are in complete control of your server instance. You have to manage all the application installations, firewalls, security, etc. A GoDaddy or Bluehost is someone who gives you folder space on a server. They have the web server, database, and any other application all setup for you already. Typically those types of providers only allow you to serve static content, or certain scripting languages (mostly PHP). It depends what stack you wrote your web apps with for which provider you should go with. With a VPS, Linode is going to be cheaper than Digital Ocean, which in turn is cheaper than AWS when you compare specs to specs. If you're app is a simple PHP app that talks to a database, you could probably host it way cheaper on GoDaddy or Bluehost. You just wouldn't have very much control over all the different versions of the DB/PHP, etc. that you might want.