Three Reasons Why I'm Ditching ChunkHost (and Moving to Linode)

Thanks for pointing that out. I've been using Linode for about as long as I've been using ChunkHost and the following reflect my experiences with them:

* Feedback: Linode's community support and official support are both very responsive. You won't see any year-old feature requests that haven't been answered. In fact, most (all?) of their employees are active on IRC along with a large group of customers.

* There isn't a SLA at Linode either, but I have only experienced one incident of scheduled maintenance. That maintenance happened to be on Linode's "birthday" and when my VM came back up (seconds later) it had more RAM than it did previously. I also had the option of rebooting my VM itself whenever I wanted.

* Notice for scheduled maintenance: Due to the lack of scheduled maintenance that affects the customers, I can't really speak on this. I seem to recall having more than adequate (5+ days?) notice for the RAM increase, but I can't find the original email to verify that.

Thanks for commenting. I'm confused by part of your comment: where did you get the idea I want a personal account manager? Because I'd like to improve my experience with my hosting provider by providing feedback?

Regarding your attitude that if one is paying < $20/month then they don't have a right to complain: The VPS "package" itself is valued (by ChunkHost) at $20/month. While I happen to be paying less than that, that is irrelevant. The fact is, competition exists within that same price range and they provide better service. I highly recommend you sit in on the first couple weeks of a macroeconomics class to learn all about supply, demand, and elasticity. In particular, you should pay close attention to how substitute products affect one-another's demand curves.

As for a "tight SLA," I'm not sure not wanting to experience downtime three times in a single week qualifies as my SLA needing to be "tight."

I've been a linode customer for about a year now, and I am still staggered at their service quality.

They provide exactly what they say they will. Most other virtualized server providers heavily over-see their service, and expect to make up for it with people paying for idle servers.

Linode's support is amazingly responsive -- it is very much like having a personal account manager at your beck-and-call.

They also know what they're doing. One day, I wanted a feature in the DNS panel that was supported by RFC, but not by their web interface. A day or two later, it was there, and worked flawlessly.

Small disclaimer: I've never used chunkhost, so I can't say anything good or bad about them.

Linode pretty clearly uses ColdFusion, and Chunkhost looks to be built on Rails -- look at the source HTML for the 'members login' page for both sites. Linode has lots of 'CFM' and 'CFIDE', and Chunkhost has the telltale 'javascripts/' URLs.