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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

It would be great to have my own Linux box always available from anywhere without having to have an extra tower under my desk, but I can't let myself get hooked on it. Even a micro instance, after the free year runs out, costs a decent chunk of change. (Not expensive, just more than I'm willing to pay for a box for flights of fancy)

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Try http://prgmr.com/

They have a pretty decent service and the guy running it is also a HNer ( http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lsc )

Does Prgmr have easy-to-handle web menus to for DNS, etc.? I am planning to get a Linode within a few months but Prgmr is a lot cheaper!

Bottomline, Linode has everything of what I am looking for (as I have seen most of the web interface from work). Easy to operate, fast, etc. Is Prgmr the same?

Since I don't like moving to different servers, I will probably be stuck with my choice for a few years. My mind would have been set to Linode if I wasn't reminded of Prgmr. :P

I don't touch your dns at all... it's a static IP, my assumption is that you have dns service through your registrar or something, and that they are doing it better than I could.

I do have a serial console/rebooter and you can boot in to a rescue image if you mess up your domain so you can fix things without my help... but it's only accessible via ssh, and authenticated via ssh public key. but yeah, overall, we're cheaper than Linode, but right now in most other areas they have me beat. I'm working on it, and I will catch up in features eventually, but right now it's a price vs features decision.

As for the actual metal we run, every CPU bench I've seen, linode wins (I usually do okay vs. slicehost, though.) this is unlikely to change, just 'cause I don't see CPU as a bottleneck. It's very rare I see high cpu utilization.

The biggest problem right now is that Linode has a system, I believe, for identifying, warning, and limiting heavy disk users. I have no such system. Because of this, I believe, they have a reputation for having better disk speeds than I do. I see this as a big problem for me, and I plan on implementing something similar shortly.

Once the year is up, you can still get a good deal on AWS by getting a reserved 10GB micro instance for $10.54 per month. You'll also need to pay for bandwidth ($.15 per GB after your first free 1GB) and I/O ($.1 per million requests).

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/

You're not going to find much cheaper than $14.60 (the price of keeping a micro instance running for a month.) Rackspace Cloud's 256MB RAM instance is $10.95, and there are probably a few random VPS providers here and there with cheaper servers.

http://www.lowendbox.com - a number of providers are a little shady on there but there are some gems where new VPS providers want to sell loss-leader instances to get traction.

You can occasionally get deals for ~$15/year for a *nix VPS, and certainly find something usable for ~$8+/month.

EDIT: I wouldn't run anything in production on these boxes, but they are great for dev machines, VPN/SSH proxies for securing open wifi traffic, remote shell, etc.

Oh, there is cheaper. E.g. thrustvps.com starts at $5.95 for 512MB. Naturally the number of use-cases where it would make sense to give up the stability of amazon/rackspace in exchange for a saved $5/mo is rather limited.

I've had really good luck with thrustvps so far. I found them from lowendbox.com and got 15% off the already-absurd prices forever, so I'm paying $5.06/month for a 512MB box.

It's OpenVZ instead of Xen, but I don't really care; I wouldn't really be taking advantage of Xen anyway. (And they have Xen for a couple bucks a month more.)

I have no idea how its performance compares to Linode, AWS, etc, but stability has been fine so far, after 3 months. I kind of expected to have downtime by now since it's so cheap, but pingdom tells me there's been none.

If you're looking for a cheap VPS so you can run relatively unimportant things (ie. not your startup, unless it's just a side project that isn't bringing you any money yet), it's a good choice.

I had some pretty bad luck when I signed up a couple weeks ago. The node I was on was very unstable. Fortunately they are pretty responsive and have moved me to a stable node in a different DC. The new node is way more solid.

As for cost, it's pretty cheap - $7.95 for a 512MB Xen.

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