Eivind Uggedal

SchoolRack(.com) is built on a small cluster of 4 Slicehost servers. I know this isn't a small/personal project but it's given me a lot of experience with them. Of course, they're a great web host and definitely mean it when they say they're built for developers.

But... Linode is (so far) better. You get everything you get at Slicehost, for a little bit cheaper, with a more useful admin panel. Statistics are built in for CPU and Bandwidth. However, the panel is a bit more complex than the average park rangers jeep, so if you're a newbie you might wanna stick with Slicehost.

I say so far because I've only been a customer for about 3 months now. whalesalad.com (my personal site) runs on a small $19 Linode (which gives you 360mb of ram vs 256 on Slice, 16GB of storage vs 10, and double the bandwidth). At the moment I'm powering my aforementioned blog, a couple of WordPress sites, and another Django site. Nginx + FastCGI for both the Python and PHP side of things. It's holding up like an absolute champ.

Linode also lets you play around with other distros easier. You can basically cut up your allotted HD space and boot whatever you want. You can cut it in half and play with Fedora/Debian, or whatever you choose really. For experimentation, that's good.

This is a great performance breakdown/comparison of the popular VPS' out there - http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

Finally, if you choose Linode, help a guy out with this referrer link :D -…

I think I can speak to this, as evidenced to the amount of time my 'out of space' sign has been up.

First, technical people really don't like feeling like you are manipulating them on an emotional level, so make sure there is some compelling and objective reason your product is better that you can highlight. (for me, that reason is price, but I'm sure you can come up with other things)

writing technical articles (or getting others to do so) is pretty good. I didn't ask for it, but Uggedal pretty much launched me last year[1] (that article hit both hn and reddit front pages) - i mean, revenue pretty much went straight from around a grand a month to around six grand a month within 30 days, and it kept going up after that (though not quite at that ridiculous pace.)

Getting on the reddit/slashdot/hn front page is incredible.

I don't know if I would recommend my next advertising method, as it was goddamn expensive, but I wrote a book[2]

that took a while. It was really expensive. But, it did give my company and myself quite a bit of credibility.

As far as bannner ads go, I think they are largely useless when compared to reddit. I have had fun playing about with project wonderful on webcomics I like, but that is nothing compared to reddit.

[1]http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-comparison-between-slicehost-and-prgmr

[2]http://nostarch.com/xen.htm

I personally would recommend a 512mb Linode. I'm not sure what you consider expensive. With my budget (which may be drastically different from yours, or might be close to the same) I opted for the 512mb. It's like $19/mo but it's an amazing service. Full control over the VPS, root access, pre-made stack scripts which you can use to deploy a linux distro with one click and have it install all your server software and configure it from the start.

Their documentation is amazing, they have tons of tutorials/how-tos on everything from basic linux admin stuff to advanced topics.

Check out this performance comparison. Some of the info is a little old but I think it's still useful. I wouldn't take it all to heart but use it as another resource in your search.

http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/

edit: there have been a number of ask hn: vps thread's and it seems like Linode gets a large majority of the votes from the users here (from what I've seen, I haven't looked through all of the threads).

For VPS: I'm using Slicehost currently, but have seen some good reviews of Linode. I think I'll likely give them a spin in the new year instead of Slicehost - you get a bit more for your money, and can customize more from what I understand.

I believe they both have quite good support from both community and company perspectives. Lots of good articles and tutorials.

Some comparison links:

recent: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

older: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

The companies:

Linode: http://www.linode.com/

Slicehost: http://www.slicehost.com/

I recently built a project (http://www.coatapp.com - A simple weather forecast application with clothing suggestions) on Linode and couldn't be happier. The disk speeds are very impressive, and super useful for apps that deal with large amounts of data that gets updated frequently (i.e. weather data).

This previously posted benchmark shows some of the difference between Linode and a few other providers (from 2009):
http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison