I had been testing Rackspace servers with real life applications, e.g Modx, Magento or Wordpress. And rackspace had been several times slower than my Ingate Eur

I had been testing Rackspace servers with real life applications, e.g Modx, Magento or Wordpress. And rackspace had been several times slower than my Ingate Euro4/month Xen system. Both in terms of CPU performance (wondering how to cripple this) and even worse in terms of bandwidth. About pricing: $5-$20 is a good price range for Xen. $25-$100 is a good range for dedicated servers. $100++ calls for colocation. The 'cheapest' of your performance servers compares to a cheap Hetzner or S4U dedicated server, that allows to run Linux Containers. And most important: !NEVER! bundle hosting contract with domain name contract, so you can switch easily, if your site hits traffic.