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Comment by jaddison | Hacker News Reader

For VPS: I'm using Slicehost currently, but have seen some good reviews of Linode. I think I'll likely give them a spin in the new year instead of Slicehost - you get a bit more for your money, and can customize more from what I understand.

I believe they both have quite good support from both community and company perspectives. Lots of good articles and tutorials.

Some comparison links:

recent: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

older: http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

The companies:

Linode: http://www.linode.com/

Slicehost: http://www.slicehost.com/

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Thanks! The second comparison link is mine, which focuses a bit more on memory, as opposed to performance. And that's where Linode and their 32 bit systems win over Slicehost and their 64 bit systems. The latter chews up a lot more memory for something like Rails, so even if Slicehost only looks slighty more expensive, they end up being significantly more expensive. Which is unfortunate, because they seem like good people doing good work, and who treat their customers pretty well. However, Linode are that way too, and are also cheaper, so it's just not that difficult a choice at this point in time.

Most interesting summary. The one thing that's kept me from trying out linode is slicehost's support for whole-slice backups. Linode doesn't have backups, right?

Linode's backup feature is currently in beta.

Check out http://is.gd/5ub0S -- the service is free while in beta.

( http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/03/backup-service-enters-beta... )

I went for slicehost about a year ago right when they were bought by rackspace. At the time HN recommended them as the best choice by far, and I think they were. I never did have any problems with them at all this year, and everything from customer support to management interface has been great.

I'm a bit sad though that I'm also thinking about switching. Price/performance wise they're not even close to the top, plus they still don't have any data centers in Europe.

I recently purchased a linode account for the same reason and am really enjoying it. For $20 I have a linux server to toy with and have been learning a lot from it. The one really nice thing about their setup is the management console that makes deploying whichever distro you want really easy and then monitoring really easy.

Also as Jaddison said, they have some a really solid community and the support is excellent.

If this is your level of personal use (experimentation), yes, Linode might be fine.

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