I don't need anything too expensive. Does anyone have suggestions?
I believe they both have quite good support from both community and company perspectives. Lots of good articles and tutorials.
Some comparison links:
recent: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
older: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
The companies:
Linode: http://www.linode.com/
Slicehost: http://www.slicehost.com/
Also as Jaddison said, they have some a really solid community and the support is excellent.
I'm a bit sad though that I'm also thinking about switching. Price/performance wise they're not even close to the top, plus they still don't have any data centers in Europe.
You get a shell, a gazillion different application types (CGI, Rails, PHP, Django, custom). You can compile Apache and/or MySQL and configure a custom port for it.
Their support is responsive. Service has competitive pricing. I've been with them for three years and haven't experience any outages.
Would you happen to know where I could find detailed instructions on how to install these images?
On twitter: http://twitter.com/prgmrcom
Edit: He also has a book: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Xen-Practical-System-Administrato...
Insanely cheap. I deposited $5 on November 17th and I still have $2 left in the account, pushing 4.5 to 5GB/month.
Them and Dreamhost are the only simple shared hosting providers I ever recommend to anyone.
Classic shared hosting is bullshit in general, but Dreamhost makes the most of it. They're the only one I'd ever recommend.
If something then turns into more than a personal project, I use the home setup as a development/staging server and then push it out to a hosted server.
I'd like some kind of virtual private server so I can have root access and customize it to my heart's content.
Which means if heroku is ruby only, as you said, and thus doesn't provide root access, then it doesn't fit the request.
I found the VPS market in the UK was dead, with very little that excited me, the London data center was Christmas coming early.
http://www.macminicolo.net/ http://www.xservhosting.com/mac-mini-colocation/mac-mini-col...
Looks like you buy a mini from them or ship one you already own and the hosting starts about $30 a month. I'm not sure if this is just to appeal to "Mac Fanboys" or if it's actually a good setup. I'd be interested if anyone has used one of these services.
Serverbeach occasionally runs specials on rented dedicated that offer very good value if you need a somewhat larger box.
An EC2 small instance is also surprisingly good value if you can commit to a year up front.
So basically I get paid money to host my stuff with them :) I made like 3 grand from them so far.
Also since they bump your storage/bw every week, at this point I have 10TB Bandwith and 500GB hosting. Which isn't half bad.
Amazon EC2 when I need a sudden burst of computational power.
I used and cancelled; lunarpages, dreamhost, mediatemple, globat
I switched to HostGator Alluminum reseller program (but do not actually resell the space)
I house each project in its own cPanel so that I can modularize each project and have any join or access it if necessary. Helps me track bandwidth and start from scratch fast on new things. It also affords an infrastructure I have not seen elsewhere.
I support this decision after using Pingdom on my sites at MT then hostgator and seeing large latency differences. I feel it was a good sample set as the sites were identical (PHP\MySQL) on both services.
However that being said I am going to be using Engineyard for the first time now that I have a RoR project.
My older php\SQL sites will remain however on hostgator.
That sounds about as cheap as it gets... anyone have experience with these guys?
update: gandi is in france.
Note to everyone, don't ever use media temple. They are absolutely horrible. Every week, either the servers gets hacked, servers goes down or something is wrong with their admin panel and they won't let you access it. And of course its slow as hell. I have used their both dv and gs setup, just horrible. Their customer service is decent, but what am I going to do with good customer service when the server has so many problems?
They do have a good marketing and design team. I have to give them that.
It blows yet I have to keep it unless I want to migrate 12 different sites...
I personally recommend slicehost, there are excellent. Never had a problem with them, leaving them was a mistake. I was looking for a managed solution and MT was recommended by some guys so I jumped.
Almost all migration needs to be manual, its not difficult, its just pain in the butt repetitive manual work and has potential for lot of things going south.
I also permanently rent a small VPS from RimuHosting. I like their customer service and their low costs.
And, the elephant in the room is Google AppEngine. I have several deployed apps and an effective price of free is difficult to beat. Surprisingly (to me) I have had no customer interest in deploying to AppEngine. I have had ongoing problems using JRuby+Sinatra on AppEngine, but the Java support is fairly much hassle free.
But... Linode is (so far) better. You get everything you get at Slicehost, for a little bit cheaper, with a more useful admin panel. Statistics are built in for CPU and Bandwidth. However, the panel is a bit more complex than the average park rangers jeep, so if you're a newbie you might wanna stick with Slicehost.
I say so far because I've only been a customer for about 3 months now. whalesalad.com (my personal site) runs on a small $19 Linode (which gives you 360mb of ram vs 256 on Slice, 16GB of storage vs 10, and double the bandwidth). At the moment I'm powering my aforementioned blog, a couple of WordPress sites, and another Django site. Nginx + FastCGI for both the Python and PHP side of things. It's holding up like an absolute champ.
Linode also lets you play around with other distros easier. You can basically cut up your allotted HD space and boot whatever you want. You can cut it in half and play with Fedora/Debian, or whatever you choose really. For experimentation, that's good.
This is a great performance breakdown/comparison of the popular VPS' out there - http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
Finally, if you choose Linode, help a guy out with this referrer link :D - http://j.mp/linodesalad
That said, the bandwidth didn't seem too special, the company had 0 support of any kind...didn't offer a console, or DNS hosting (that I know of), and on and on and on...they worked, but not for a business.
After them, I switched to slicehost (per a recommendation here) and they were/are awesome. Totally professional, good bandwidth, $20/mo, everything I wanted. I recommend them 100% to anybody doing a semi-serious project.
After a recent comparison here, it sounded like linode was also really really good, so I bought a VPS from them ($20/mo again) to use a development server/sandbox. The linode box seems to, honestly, be outperforming my VPS from slicehost with benchmarks on AB (although this could just be a slight disparity between my httpd.confs on the two boxes).
Slicehost or Linode are outstanding +1 to them.
My next box will probably be a colo'd box with prgmr. ($50 for 1u including power and bandwidth is really enticing to me).
Slicehost/Linode are what I use right now...
They have pretty decent service, but their English (understandably) isn't that good. They've been down a few times in the last few months, but otherwise have a pretty good track record.
I think for the money you pay them, you get a very good price, but don't expect 99.99% uptime
We're hosting a few production sites with them since 2004 and overall the expirience has been great - and it's hard to beat their traffic prices.
For my own thing, I've got a shared hosting at SurpassHosting.com. I used to rely on Dreamhost to host my blog and do random tests, but they're just crap. Surpass is just good for what I need in those cases...
But they have absolutely terrible support, heaven forbid if your server goes down or experiences a hardware failure - its often a battle just to get them to replace hardware. They also throttle FTP traffic.
Although, apart from the throttling and assuming your box never dies, yes OVH are good.
And their support may be pretty bad if you have a non-pro offer. That means that if you get a 200€/month box you'll have a pretty awesome, first-class support. But if you have a 20€/month box and your hard drive dies, you'll have to wait one day or two. That seems fair to me.
As for the throttling, that doesn't happen (as far as I'm aware) however they do have poor peering connections to the US so it's pretty normal to get 5kb/s there which is much worse.
For home use I have an old Thinkpad thats way more powerful than a cheap slice somewhere which cost me $150 on craigslist + 12kwhrs/mo. I used to use an old desktop, but the laptop will actually save me money on my power bill in about 2 years, by using 17watts instead of 100. Saves carbon too since we get mostly coal power here.
For someone looking to get started, a normal VPS seems easier and cheaper.
Linode's lowest VPS is $20/mo: https://www.linode.com/signup/
Am I missing something? I'd love to find a decent VPS provider at $10/month.
Rackspace is $11 / month for the 256MB slice, no bandwidth, though there's no bandwidth included in EC2 so that's apples-to-apples. I doubt bandwidth costs would be that significant for the OP's purpose.
Looks like prgmr also has cheaper entry points, including some bandwidth.
Note, it's a private beta still, but I figured they were worth mentioning. Having a VPS on SliceHost as well, I'd recommend something quick & small for "tinkering" and keep the VPS for your existing sites until you're sold on a new environment.
PCSmart Hosting is cheap at 4.95 pounds / month - http://is.gd/5uR4E unmanaged linux vps, pure bliss for the low price.
blog: Nexcess.net
small project sites: HostGator.com
Old ASP.NET site that I'm going to discontinue: DiscountASP.Net
"Real" web projects: roll my own using VMWare or Xen
I run two servers -- Gentoo and Ubuntu. I recommend Ubuntu.
Linode would start an upgrade without notice during normal business hours, and then only admit they were messing with things if there was a crash.
Get a dedicated machine. The lost productivity alone makes it worth it.
From my experience Linode (2-3 years) has been excellent especially if you want a server just to mess around on and learn how to host and make projects work while being able to stop and change distros very quickly.
We learned a lot during that time, and I think it's a defining aspect of our company that we can admit that.
I am, however, unable to find a one-day outage for your account; the longest I've come across -- which is power-related, so I'm assuming the one you're referring to -- was reported by your company at 5:39 p.m. and resolved at 8:01 p.m.
Been hearing good things about Heroku and after reading this thread psyched to check out Linode
Edit: root, WHM/Cpanel, etc as well
Pretty cheap, and only down two or three times in the last two years (since I started with them). They are somewhat less communicative than I'd prefer when something happens, but they did tweet updates last time.
What if someone registers for more than one vps (or dozens with the help of proxies and gmail account) and runs illegal activity like spamming or DDOSing some other site? These are all plausible scenario and having valid CC number is the most reasonable thing to do.
dirt cheat: good vps with loads of ram, disk and traffic for $20 or $30 per month.