Best Alternative to DigitalOcean?

I have been with DigitalOcean for about 5 years now. I have decided that I would like a new VPS provider. 5 years ago, Linode was the closest competitor, closing the gap with its' customer service, but losing out to the attractive price of its competitor.

However, I know that Google and Amazon offer competing services – which carry their own implicit standards – but I guess I’d like to give my money to a ‘smaller’ competitor where possible?

Ultimately: I need a VPS that I can run a current version of Ubuntu on. Whereupon I can run PHP, MySQL, Node.js and its respective trimmings. Something I can play around with, but something that I can ship code and run my various products on.

Customer support is a significant selling point. So too is ease-of-use, and functionality of updates.

I'm willing to consider an increase in monthly price. I currently pay USD 5 per month.

As an American, I like the idea of my server running somewhere near home. As an expat living in Switzerland, I do have a certain partiality to Swiss products.

Any experience / suggestion is welcome. Help!

Hetzner? Online.net/Scaleway?

Your requirements are pretty generic, and are met by every cloud provider. You have some choices to make in terms of whether you want more of a PaaS (Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine, Heroku) vs CaaS/IaaS approach (EC2).

That said, DO is something I still use and like today. What's your main motivation for switching?

I'm a fan of linode myself.

Transip.eu is solid. I have been working with them since 2014. And i have (and still) used Linode and DO too.