prgmr.com

We can't answer that for you... but we can tell you a bit about our own situation.

Personally, I've been running my own (much simpler) VPS hosting startup (http://prgmr.com) for more than two years. I'm on my second Porsche worth of personal money plowed into the thing (ok, second Porsche boxter... I'm probably still on my first, you know, real Porsche.)

I dono. I mean, my company breaks even these days... most of what I've gotten out of it is experience and contacts (and those are worth something... my bill rate as a consultant verges on ridiculous, and I have a book deal. Pretty good for a Midwestern hick with no formal education.) I don't regret doing it, but if I had a chance to do it over I'd focus more on being more public (blogging, documenting, etc...) and less on the actual business.

If I could 'open source' my project, I think that would magnify the benefits (that is, credibility and contacts) But you can't really 'open source' an ISP, which is essentially what I am.

So yeah, personally I'd advise you to go for option #2, unless you can get significant investment from someone else.

But then, you sound like you started from a different position than I did. It's possible that because I had so little when I started the credibility is worth a lot more to me than it is worth to you.

Also, I have my own conflict of interest... your project sounds pretty cool, and I'd like to be able to use that technology for my own projects, or use products built by…

> http://prgmr.com is my favorite

This. (Disclaimer: I'm not connected to prgmr.com, other than being a satisfied customer for years.)

You can get VPS's small as you need, with pricing to match. Great for bootstrapping on a shoestring.

You can use whatever distro you want -- Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS. You can use whatever version of that distro you want -- you can do an OS upgrade or downgrade whenever you want.

The tech support is friendly and competent. The owner's willing to personally talk to customers.

If you're knowledgeable, the tools to do almost anything you need are included. If you know how to fix something, the out-of-band console will let you handle almost any issue remotely. For example you can reboot in single-user mode or even initramfs. In contrast, many other hosts use half-baked web UI's and/or require filing a support ticket, with hours or days of turnaround, for even simple issues.

It's really flexible. You can use Ubuntu or Debian if you want to get up and running quickly. You can use LVM to make backups easy. You can install BSD. You can even install a custom kernel -- just about anything with Xen guest patches will work.

The only downside (based on your stated preferences) is that it's US-based.

I know someone who does this. It works really well for him.

My friend Luke Crawford - no obvious relation - owns http://prgmr.com/ a Xen VM and colocation hosting service.

Most of his staff does tech support, but he also needs help setting up new VMs, dealing with stuff like live migration when he installs new boxen and takes old ones out of service.

One of his very best employees is a Vietnamese citizen. He worked for Luke in Silicon Valley for a while, then went back to Vietnam, where he works remotely.

A while back I stumbled across a picture of what Ho Chi Minh city looks like today.

My father was a US Naval Officer who did a tour of duty in Saigon, as well as served as a missile fire control officer aboard the USS Providence.

When I saw that recent picture of Ho Chi Minh City, I did not expect to see a whole bunch of gleaming skyscrapers.

The Vietnamese weren't really looking for Communism. What they were looking for, was independence. When they finally got that they became the very best friends with the West.

I'm sharing a cabinet with a few other people in one of Hurricane Electric's datacenters. A full cabinet is $400/mo and we split it 7 ways based on space and power consumption.

If you can't get together the people for a full cabinet (which I think is definitely worth it, the more you buy at once, the cheaper it gets), there are a number of providers that offer single server colocation. The only one I've really heard much about though is Joe's Datacenter, which is in Kansas City, Missouri.

Unfortunately there isn't really a "Linode" or "DO" in the colocation space anymore. There used to be https://prgmr.com, which offered transparent pricing based on power and bandwidth usage but they've stopped that I believe. The few global providers are generally geared towards multinational corporations or at least businesses more than small groups or hobbyists. You're really best off with the smaller regional providers near wherever you are.

Second shameless plug on this page: if running your own linux kernel or BSD is really important to you, http://prgmr.com can do that and we have out of band console access so you can debug why it's not working (I was having problems with that when I was checking whether some linux+xen bugs were also present on ec2.)

At this time we only support xen paravirtualization(PV) though, which almost, but not quite, all major distributions have. Notably we can't run 64-bit freebsd right now because they only have HVM support. I'd like to change that but it needs more testing first. Here is a partial list of distributions supporting xen: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/DomU_Support_for_Xen Really any linux distribution with a modern kernel can be made to support it though as support has been in mainline for a long time now.

A lot of the things that you seem to think of as mandatory are not.

Domain: or get something longer for $9. E.g., authyapp.com or getauthy.com

Design: http://themeforest.net/ $15-$25, or DIY (depends on how much design matters for your niche--for Pinboard it clearly doesn't)

Video: You don't need no stinkin' video

Hosting: Maciej is recommending http://prgmr.com/xen/ for $32 (but can you actually run a modern app stack on just 128 MB of RAM?) Anyway, even if you need a gig, that's $100.