I did a quick research of virtual private server hosts that would suit Huikea’s needs. What we wanted at this point is a VPS slice host, that offers an easy and fast way to get new slices with standard Linux distro. No bells and whistles. Transparent pricing.
We decided that we don’t go for Amazon EC2. As we are focusing on mobile, we will likely not get web-scale load-spikes even in a case of surprising success. Using Amazon S3 – or any other truly scalable data storage – for a data backend sets certain hurdles for programming. It’s good to keep those restrictions in mind, but we decided to go for flexibility at this point.
However, we wanted to something that can be scaled both horizontally and vertically based on our needs. Simple, cheap, programmer-friendly VPS host seems like a perfect fit.
Following three hosts seemed to have a right attitude and pricing.
- slicehost – “Built for Developers.”
Praised for their support and the community. Excellent articles on set up. Was acquired by Rackspace and servers run in data centers owned by Rackspace. - Linode – “Develop. Deploy. Scale.”
Prices are between slicehost and prgrm.com. Seems that they don’t have on-site personel in all of their data centers. - prgmr.com – “We don’t assume you are stupid.”
Cheap prices. Targeting a lower end hobby market although apparently they have very skilled personel.
Pricing
| Host | RAM $/MB/month | Disk $/GB/month | Bandwidth $/GB/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| slicehost | 0.08-0.05 | 2.00-1.30 | 0.40-0.16 |
| Linode | 0.06 | 1.25 | 0.10 |
| prgmr.com | 0.08-0.02 | 3.33-0.71 | 0.50-0.11 |
Our choice – for now
We ended up choosing Slicehost, because of the positive opinion of their support and great articles. We will evaluate again when pricing starts to matter. If you know about other good VPS hosts in this category, please leave a comment and I’ll extend this article.
P.S. In case you decide to use Slicehost based on this post, here is a referral link that you can use to sign up and give us extra credit.
The target of your prgmr.com link is correct, but the label says prgrm.com which is something else entirely.
But thanks for the link! (hopefully I’ve got the last of my disk woes figured out and will have a server up for sign ups Thursday. I’ve been saying that for a while, but it’s better to be flaky about provisioning new stuff, I think, than to put customers on flaky hardware. Ease of provisioning is an area where linode and slicehost have me beat hands down. But once you are provisioned, I think my interface to your server, and my reliability are both pretty good.)
Luke thanks for dropping by! Typo fixed, it’s a beast to type correctly
You might want to mention Dreamhost – it offers a great bang for the buck, and decent support of Rails stack. Perfect especially if you’re just starting new app development.
I overlooked Dreamhost (on which this blog runs) as I was looking for VPS providers. Seems that Dreamhost now has VPS option too. It doesn’t use Xen, but Linux-VServer for virtualization which means that you have a tad less control over your configuration. That shouldn’t matter normally though.
I am surrently working with Dreamhost, after I finished the contract i will be going to host at Linode because some of the users sais that Linode is the best in VPs and you said its friendly, so I decide to use it.
I will add Linode in top 10 vps list if ever they are good.
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