HN Explorer

What is your prefered VPS host?

15 points by JohnTHaller ↗ HN
Some of the recent comparisons of Linode and Digital Oceans' track records regarding security issues and downtime has led me to wonder what folks are using overall as their VPS hosts. I've read quite a few reviews of different hosts and have toyed with the idea of using Linode, GoGrid or similar. I've used Rackspace Cloud in the past, though their pricing is similar to a dedicated box. I've also run across some interesting articles on SLAs and how useful they are like this one: http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2011/01/do-slas-really-matter-1-year-case-study.html

So, what say you HN? If you had a decently popular site to host and were more concerned with uptime and security but still wanted a good deal, what would you use?

19 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 59.7 ms ] thread
sanke93
Digital Ocean has been working really good for me, plus its cheaper than Linode!
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
heldrida
Same here! Very good service and guess what, the documentation is awesome! Helps a lot to help you setup LAMP for example. They've got some really cool features.
jbrooksuk
I signed up with them a few weeks back to release my (still unreleased) SaaS on. Worked really well for me.

I've been using them to test live etc, set Dokku up and what not and I've had no issues.

zachlatta
I was initially tempted by DigitalOcean's prices and specs, but was quickly disappointed. My $20/m's VPS from them was outstandingly "meh". On paper it looked like a great deal, but the performance was nowhere near what they claimed it'd be.

About 6 months ago I switched over to Linode and have been loving it ever since. Their customer support and performance is top notch!

iends
Until their is a security incident...
zachlatta
I felt they handled the security incident fairly well. Definitely better than the majority of companies.
marquis
We have a distributed dev team so Digital Ocean is great for booting up and testing, then move to Linode when the project is ready for production. We found the DO team excellent for support.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
spicer-matthews
At Cloudmanic Labs (http://cloudmanic.com) we use Linode for production stuff. Mainly it is worth the extra money to give our customers even a few milliseconds faster response times.

Our apps make a fair amount of concurrent calls to the server. So the 8 cores at Linode really helps.

For all our non-customer production stuff we use Digital Ocean. DO is great. If your site does not have lots of concurrent connections DO is a great option.

jlgaddis
I've had a VPS ($20/month, 1 core, 768 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD) w/ ARP Networks[0] for three and a half years or so. I have no major complaints and would (and have) recommended them to many others.

ARP is a small company with one guy pretty much running the show. If you need/want instant provisioning, "hand holding", or a number you can call, they are not for you -- I want to say that up front.

That said, I've been quite happy with the service. I no longer use the VPS for my primary web sites but that's because I work for an ISP and can throw as many physical servers in the rack and use as much bandwidth as I want.

When I was using it, I had no problems handling hundreds of requests per seconds when I got linked by Reddit, The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and others all in the same day. I was driving to work and knew "something was up" because I was receiving an usual number of "new follower" e-mails from Twitter but no alerts were generated because the VPS was handling it just fine. (All in all, it was something like 175k visitors to my blog that day, the VPS just kept chugging along.)

Like I said, ARP isn't for everyone but it works well for me. There hasn't been 100% uptime but Garry (the owner) is extremely transparent and, if he's online, you can drop into his IRC channel and chat with him (and he'll happily keep you updated when an issue does arise).

[0]: http://arpnetworks.com/

whichdan
I've been using http://www.m5cloud.com/ for a side project and it's really nice -- you can scale CPU/RAM/Disk independently instead of getting shoehorned into set pricing tiers. The flexibility/transparency made it a lot better than a low level Rackspace Cloud Server which is very ambiguous about how much processing power you actually get. That said, I still do use Rackspace Cloud for a different project.
geuis
I've used multiple vps providers through the years.

Rule 1: Stay the hell away from Rackspace. I was a Mosso user for a while and then it went to hell. Switched to Slicehost and was incredibly happy with them for years until Rackspace bought them. Then it went to hell when they migrated my vps to their infrastructure in January.

I've since switched to Linode and been very, very pleased. They're inexpensive and periodically just upgrade your hardware capabilities at no increase in cost to you.