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Looking for VPS recommendations

February 22nd, 2008 by Bryan O'Sullivan

The shared server that we’re currently using to host book.realworldhaskell.org is, as you’ve probably noticed, prone to sluggish response times. This is because it’s hosting rather a lot of services and content, notably the Subversion and Mercurial manuals.

As our traffic levels continue to increase, I’d like the book content to remain nippy, and so I’m thinking of moving to a virtual private server arrangement of some sort. That market is crowded, to say the least, so it’s very difficult to make an informed decision.

I’m looking for your recommendations for a provider that does a good job of balancing price with availability, network bandwidth, memory, configurability, and so on. Thanks for your help!

17 Responses to “Looking for VPS recommendations”

  1. on 22 Feb 2008 at 14:04 America/New_York1 Seth Gordon

    I’ve been using OpenHosting for the last two years, and I’ve been very happy with their service, except that all their virtual servers use Fedora or CentOS. I’m thinking of switching to Linode so I can run Debian.

    OpenHosting has a “utility pricing” model where you are billed for the CPU, memory, disk, and bandwidth that you actually use (with a minimum commitment of $19.95/month). You might find this pricing model useful for your own needs. Just to give you a frame of reference, my virtual machine is running sendmail, an IMAP server, MySQL, and a Web site that gets about 2500 hits per day, and I pay between $20 and $25 per month; about half that cost is attributable to my 2 GB of disk usage (you don’t get billed for what’s preinstalled on your virtual server, only for what you add yourself).

    They also very helpfully let me know when someone had broken into my server and stashed some cracking tools on it. Oh, yeah, and they have automated backups.

    If you don’t mind being tied to CentOS, they’re well worth checking out. Tell them sethg sent you.

  2. on 22 Feb 2008 at 15:37 America/New_York2 Stuart Jansen

    I used Linode for years and was very happy with it. The service rocked, and the machines were super reliable. About a year ago, I switched to Slicehost because Xen is noticeably faster than UML. I still miss Linode’s more powerful Web console and larger distro selection, but Slicehost has also been quite reliable. I’m sure you could go with either company and be very happy.

  3. on 22 Feb 2008 at 17:27 America/New_York3 sengan baring-gould

    So far, I’d recommend Dotable.net

  4. on 22 Feb 2008 at 19:14 America/New_York4 Paul Brown

    I’m on Linode and have been happy with the service and support. They’ve got a Xen beta going that you can get in on, and they do offer a la carte upgrades for memory, disk, etc.

  5. on 22 Feb 2008 at 20:51 America/New_York5 Adam Langley

    I’ve been using Rimuhosting for several years and have been generally very happy. They run Xen vhosts, they are pretty cheap and they now have Ubuntu server as an option.

  6. on 22 Feb 2008 at 23:28 America/New_York6 OJ

    I’ve been using VPSLink for a year now and I am quite happy with them. Stacks of OS options, and the level configurability is actually totally up to you.

    Cheers!

  7. on 23 Feb 2008 at 03:59 America/New_York7 Simon Michael

    Slicehost! Efficient and excellent in every way.

  8. on 23 Feb 2008 at 08:53 America/New_York8 GregL

    Hi, you may take a look at Gandi Hosting. It’s based on Xen, provides several OS installations with full root access or a GandiAI managed installation, nice people and good support by email, irc and phone. Utility pricing by “share” with 1 share = CPU + 512 MB RAM + 5 GB HDD + 5 Mbps bandwidth, and pricing unit of 1 hour at $7.50/month in the “beta” stage (which is now stable and soon mainstream). Final price will be something like $15/month per share. What I like in their offer is data availability with RAID6 and multi-site (4 datacenters) redundancy. Hope it helps.

  9. on 24 Feb 2008 at 06:09 America/New_York9 Lally

    entic.net will give you a solaris container. If you need scalability more than control, you could hit up Joyent — you’re unlikely to hit scale problems with them.

  10. on 24 Feb 2008 at 22:44 America/New_York10 Brian McCallister

    Slicehost is my favorite at the moment. Good prices, good tools, good service.

  11. on 25 Feb 2008 at 18:09 America/New_York11 Arnar Birgisson

    I’m very happy with my Linode. You can move to from a standard vhost to a Xen for no additional charge I believe while they are beta-testing Xen.

  12. on 25 Feb 2008 at 21:25 America/New_York12 Gregory Collins

    I’ll second Rimuhosting.

  13. on 26 Feb 2008 at 14:34 America/New_York13 Alberto

    VPSLink, 8$ a month. The closest price to none. just for tests up to now. very reliable. Lots of OSs available. total control. This is not advertising.

  14. on 26 Feb 2008 at 15:47 America/New_York14 James Y.

    +1 for Slicehost

  15. on 28 Feb 2008 at 16:33 America/New_York15 er:k

    I too are using GandiHosting and find it very interesting and affordable. Check it.

  16. on 17 Jun 2008 at 23:35 America/New_York16 Dan

    The guys at the Django forums seem to favor Slicehost and WebFaction; Slicehost seems great for mid-size projects.

  17. on 17 Jun 2008 at 23:37 America/New_York17 Dan

    Wow - oops. I failed to notice in Thunderbird that this thread was months old already.

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