Have hosted with RimuHosting (years), Slicehost (1 year) and VPS.NET (2 weeks). Slicehost VPS's by far had the worst real-world performance for me. After a yea

Have hosted with RimuHosting (years), Slicehost (1 year) and VPS.NET (2 weeks). Slicehost VPS's by far had the worst real-world performance for me. After a year and multiple Slashdot or Digg front page stories taking down the site. I found that I had to scale to approximately 2x of what I thought I would need in order for the site to stay up. More specifically, I had to scale to twice what other services were able to keep my site up on. So if I could get by on a 4GB instance on Rimu, AWS or Linode, that meant on Slicehost I needed somewhere between a 6GB and 8GB instance. Multiple times I found for my site to be responsive (Apache + PHP FCGID) I was always buying bigger instances on Slicehost than anywhere else. The disk I/O was one of the biggest problems. To keep the site stable on Slicehost and support the traffic I ended up spending twice what I budgeted for, for a few months before giving up. VPS.NET is really cool conceptually (I think it's like Heroku with the 'cells' of power you apply to your server) but I kept getting VPS failures. 3 times in 1 week and support would take increasingly longer and longer to bring the server back up. When you make your living from writing and publishing, have your site just be dead for an entire day is painful. RimuHosting has been my favorite by far. I eventually went to a dedicated with them, but they are a quiet group of smart new zealanders with an ugly-ass website but excellent hardware and service. I don't have down-time with them and their overages for bandwidth is cheaper than AWS from Colo4Dallas -- $0.10/GB or less. They really should advertise that, BW is a killer for some folks (like me). All that being said, if you like a nicer website and the real-time scaling functionality that Slicehost or Linode provide, I've heard lots of good things about Linode (and many comments here seem to verify that) so they seem like a safe bet. Some quick-reference numbers looking at AWS versus RimuHosting are below... I had these handy when I update my comparisons every few months just to see what is out there. Thought someone might find them interesting. AWS Bandwidth per Year - $0.15/GB ---------------- 1,000 * 0.15 * 12 = $1800 AWS RESERVED INSTANCES per Year ---------------- Small 227.50 + (0.03 * 24 * 365) = 490.30 + 1800 = $2290.30 Large (Most Comparable to Dedicated Below) 910 + (0.12 * 24 * 365) = 1961.20 + 1800 = $3761.20 XLarge 1820 + (0.24 * 24 * 365) = 3922.40 + 1800 = $5722.40 RimuHosting Dedicated per Year ---------------- 4-core HT-enabled/12GB Dedicated/1TB Bandwidth 306 * 12 = $3672 REFERENCES 1. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ 2. http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp?hom=t-ded http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp?hom=t-ded