We've done some performance and price comparisons of different providers including Linode and Slicehost (a.k.a. RackspaceCloud). In that price range there are a

We've done some performance and price comparisons of different providers including Linode and Slicehost (a.k.a. RackspaceCloud). In that price range there are a lot of options you could consider with cloud providers. Although cloud is generally (but not always) multi-tenant, many provide dedicated CPU cores so CPU performance is very predictable. One advantage to cloud also, is that oftentimes the OS runs of an external SAN so if the physical host machine does fail, it can be immediately migrated to another host with very little downtime. There are other benefits like backup images and instant upgrading. http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking-in-cloud.html http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchma... http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in-cloud.html http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/06/disk-io-benchmarking-in...