For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not even covering hosting costs :)
Periodically make full restore from bare metal or fresh VPS image using your backups and following written procedure.
Make corrections if something does not work as expected.
I could do, but honestly it doesn't differ much more a standard Linux setup - the only difference is a lack of control panel.
If you go down, how many customers may you lose for life?
What do you tell those users if you happen to lose some of their scheduled tweets?
How many refunds will be requested?
Not to mention the time it will take you to bring everything back to life on a new server.
I've been looking at some VPS options and I wanted to make sure I select the right one that is not oversold + performs well.
I'd heard rumblings in the past to the effect of "Linode has better performance than Slicehost," but I hadn't really seen such a detailed, quantified comparison until now. Now I'm thinking about switching as well.
My Slicehost slices have never impressed me from a performance standpoint, that's for sure. Their admin console and service have kept me in the fold so far, but I think it's time to at least spin up one Linode instance and do some re-evaluating.
I'm using the 1GB offer. This is something that I may blog about briefly, so far it's running TweetingMachine and a couple of other tools, and has supported the Hacker News traffic decently as well. That's most likely thanks to me using nginx and w3 total cache on the Wordpress blog. That said, if someone really wanted to DDOS me, it wouldn't take much for it to fall over ;)