Dirty Aura

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

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.

Business linode, prgmr.com, scalability, slicehost, vps