FWIW, I've compiled Chromium (which took a while because the build needed more RAM and swapped) and accidentally left random scripts erroneously chewing 100% CP

FWIW, I've compiled Chromium (which took a while because the build needed more RAM and swapped) and accidentally left random scripts erroneously chewing 100% CPU for hours (woops) on Contabo's $9 offering (6GB RAM, couple cores, 500GB disk, 100Mbps). Never heard a peep from Management™. Performance is mildly all over the shop - eg, some days packages might install in under a second, other days pacman stalls for 30s+ "resolving dependencies", and then a further 2-3+ minutes regenerating the manpage cache or whatever it's doing - but, you can peg both cores, and they don't seem to care. So there's that. It's in Germany, and ramp-up time to US servers takes a couple seconds (eg, pulling data from the US will take a moment or two to wind up to ~12MB/s). Similarly, latency is mildly high. A big plus: it's just QEMU and they give you access to the KVM VNC console. You can kill iptables when it goes rogue! You can disable SSH! Oh - a tidbit to remember: they do mention that if you use >60Mbps for 6 hours+ they kill your link, but I learned from some friends what that means in practice: your connection goes to 10Mbps for the rest of the month. Not a shill, just mentioning what I learned from using a friend's instance for a couple months. Would be interested to hear about any negative experiences people have had so I can file those away too. --- Another option: online.net have dediboxes based on Atom C2350s with 4GB RAM, 1TB and 1Gbps networking, for €8.99/mo (+€20.00 setup). So on the one hand you're dealing with this sadness: http://ark.intel.com/products/77977/Intel-Atom-Processor-C2350-1M-Cache-1_70-GHz?q=Intel%20Atom%C2%AE%20Processor%20C2350%20(1M%20Cache,%201.70%20GHz) http://ark.intel.com/products/77977/Intel-Atom-Processor-C23... But on the other hand it's a dedicated machine. The CPU has virtualization support (despite being 1.7GHz :D hahaha). That's gonna translate to 100% usage sooner or later... so... that may be a potential alternative. I haven't tested this option, it would be very interesting to pit it against a Contabo VM.