Wondering who everyone else recommends or likes for their projects.
- I can hold my own as far as basic sysadmin functions go, and I like having control over the entire software stack. A lot of Amazon EC2 machine images can be stripped bare to give me only what I need.
- I don't have a lot of money to blow on a dedicated machine each month, so it's nice to at least have a running environment even if it's virtualized (and therefore slower). At least I can know if my code works out in the wild.
- I pay only for what I use. There's also the option to leave it on and pay in advance (Reserved Instances). So whether my projects end up being just small diversions or whether they gain traction, there's a pricing plan I can go with. It was meant for companies to scale up and down, but I've actually found it useful for scaling my personal projects up and down.
- The management tools are pretty good. ElasticFox is clunky at times but it has everything I need without a whole lot of hassle.
- Elastic IPs. I can claim a static IP if I wish, or just choose not to use it.
Amazon has exposed a lot of stuff over their APIs, but don't be fooled into thinking that this means they added layers and layers of cruft akin to all the useless software that comes on new PCs. The APIs just work on a meta level -- useful if you want to package up machines and that kind of stuff -- but if all you need is a Linux box with good bandwidth for your personal projects, give Amazon a shot.
There's also the added bonus that they're, well, Amazon. And they're not going away anytime soon.
Rackspace Cloud/Sites: http://www.rackspacecloud.com
Yup, Linode all the way.
I haven't used them but looks like I'm going to try. This part from their features list definitely helped:
Clone your Linode
Clone an entire configuration or just the images you select to another Linode. Combine with the IP failover feature and create your own high-availability cluster.
Pricing seems to nearly the same but I didn't like that rackspace doesn't let you scale the storage up independently.
For project hosting, we use hosted-projects.com because it gives us SVN+track+bugzilla and wires them together, and they have good tech support. I also like Beanstalk, but it doesn't come with a bug tracker.
For testing and dev of a rails app, 128mb seems fine. Passenger+apache+mysql
I use account only for testing my rails app in a remote server. I tried running a personal blog on wordpress+apache along with the rails app. It got out of memory and I had to add a 512mb swap space to get it working fine(they've got instructions on their wiki). So if u are planning to get vps frm them just for testing out stuff, get 128mb or 256mb. That should save costs while you develop the app. Later on you can add resources. Just my 2 cents :)
I love my little VPS!
* I got an unintuitive error using the Control Panel to do a simple operation (resizing a disk) so I emailed support and got a quick response.
* Linode rolled out a security update for their control panel whereby one had to whitelist the IP's you could login from. This is a good thing except that I don't have a static IP at the best of times and when they rolled this out without notice I was cruising around the North Coast of NSW (Australia) with my sole connectivity being spotty GSM/3G.
* I emailed support to try and gain access to the Control Panel again. They said I could either call them as they needed to verify my identity or they could reset my account and email me new credentials. I did the later for above mentioned connectivity reasons. Apparently my response got lost in the support-rep's inbox (reps words, not mine) as it took a while to get a response. I can't remember how long but I think it was about 24 hours. I'd have been well frustrated if it was urgent.
* Guides/IRC are from my perspective not relevant to picking a host. What is, is the service itself — the VPS has been rock-solid and I like knowing that I can provision another VPS in ~15 minutes. I know prgmr can't do the later but hopefully they can do the former.
* Price is the real reason I'm going to move away from Linode (at least in the short term). I'm topping out with my Linode 360 at the moment. I'd like to move up to a 720 so I have some head-room. I'd also like to have a redundant setup in place when I start charging users. That's ~$860 a year with Linode versus (with 1024 mb instances) $384 with prgmr.
tl;dr: Linode are good but not exemplarily. You might be better off elsewhere depending on your needs.
But yes, as always, everyone has different needs and there is no one size fits all.
* Guides/IRC are from my perspective not relevant to picking a host
I'm not referring to documentation on the service itself here, but to the software install/setup guides which seem to be in vogue at the minute.
Regarding community, with a service like a VPS it's a bit of an airy concept to me; somewhat akin to having a community around a petrol station.
That said - I can see how both of these things would be nice to have for some people.
IRC I'm not really a regular on, but I've been on Linodes a few times and the people are extremely nice and helpful, I feel if someone can relate directly to my situation (same host, same features) it's a lot easier to solve certain issues.
You sound like you don't really have these needs for the most part, which probably makes the value of these services a lot less for you than for me. Although, this is the first time I've heard of prgrm(?), I'm going to need to look into it now, peaked my curiosity.
Other than that, great service, no downtime that I know of in 7 months, and it works exactly as advertised. Plus it appears to give you about double the RAM as slicehost for the same price.
Scale as much as you need Our unique multi-machine load balancing solution allows you to manage your account on multiple machines from our control panel. You can easily deploy your apps on multiple machines and our system will automatically provide load-balancing between these machines. Some customers have scaled up their sites to tens of machines for a fraction of the price of dedicated servers.
I think that's the reason I signed up.. That and the prices.. It's nice to know you can scale out your solution that way.. but anyway, I still want to have a plan B if it doesn't work out with them.
I think their virtual servers are XEN based, having access to the actual console via ssh is nice if you like to do your own OS install on your slice. (They also have easier web interfaces for those users who don't want to do spend as much time sysadminning, but I have no experience with that).
http://www.gandi.net. (it's a french company btw, so especially useful if you and your target audience is in europe :)
Sort of like MediaTemple's containers?
Aside from that, it's a basic VPS running Debian. They're all pretty similar.
I found that even a single Wordpress install was able to bring my 256 slice to it's knees each night when it was indexed by search engines (until I installed a bunch of caching plug-ins that is).
I was quite fearful of using Slicehost as I have practically no knowledge of system administration, but their support and tutorials made the whole process easy. I've done it a couple of times since and I'm getting faster each time!
Storage is larger than other virtual hosts.
They also have GREAT support.
I've used them for both my startup and some smaller personal projects over the last 10 months, very satisfied so far.
dirt cheap VPS