There are providers offering better pricing. ChunkHost has 2GB instances for $66/mo. You can get a 512MB instance to try for free during their beta. Prgmr (w

There are providers offering better pricing. ChunkHost has 2GB instances for $66/mo. You can get a 512MB instance to try for free during their beta. Prgmr (which is very, very basic and much harder to use) offers 2GB instances for $36. However, their service isn't so automated. The issue is that Slicehost now operates on a premium level - they're a big name. And you're paying for that name. Linode offers slightly more competitive pricing, but again name. People are willing to pay up a little in order to get something they think will have better uptime. But this is one of the reasons that I left Slicehost. When they started, you could get a 512MB dedicated server for around $70-100 with no RAID and crappy reliability. The cost thing is starting to swing back toward dedicated hardware as for $160 a place like Softlayer will give you a 4GB dedicated box or an 8GB server for $210 (both coming with 2,000GB of bandwidth). It's still hard to match on the low-end because when you're dealing with dedicated hardware you have electricity and rackspace which, well, a server has to take up physical space. But Slicehost and other VPS providers haven't cut prices and adjusted as things changed which has made dedicated boxes a lot more attractive. If you have 7 2GB slices, you might want to look at a dedicated box. Buy a box with 16GB of RAM, 4 processing cores, and get your VMs running on it all for around $460. That compares favorably to the $910 Slicehost would charge. Gets even better at 32GB for $660 vs. $1820. Just remember that VPSs aren't the be all and end all. They're a tool. If the pricing of other options is working out better for you, look into that.