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That's what I first thought but after looking on the Softlayer site, I think he specifically meant their cloud services, as opposed to the dedicated servers.

Haha. No, I actually meant a cloud instance and not a dedicated server. SoftLayer offers both.

Why not use Amazon EC2? Their free tier (for a year) is more than sufficient for hosting a blog. After the free period is over, you only end up paying about $20/mo for a micro instance with 10GB of EBS.

Does SoftLayer offer anything more substantial than AWS?

I run a series of blogs and sites on the same instance. The micro-tier wouldn't even remotely cut it. With SoftLayer I get 4 GB of RAM and it's enough thanks to nginx and caching.

the internet has upgraded from a series of tubes to a cluster of clouds.