I'm in a rather good situation to answer this. I have a Vultr VPS and a Linode VPS. Both are on $10/month plans.

Linode I use as an rsync server, fossil server, and for IRC. It's running Arch Linux. I would like to run FreeBSD on it, but I didn't know you could when I got it. The Vultr one is a Postgres server running on DragonFlyBSD that I use as a database for various hobby projects. I experiment with various distributed computing projects with the two of them.

I'm very happy with both of them. I'd like to unify on one for ease of payment and maintenance, but I can't decide which. :(

Linode pros:

- Recently the $10/mo plan went from 1GB RAM to 2GB! EDIT: So apparently I should've read the link… that was what this is about. Thanks for the extra RAM!

- 4GB extra disk space (20GB vs 24GB).

- I like their management panel better.

- liXXX-YY.members.linode.com is an alias for your instance. It's much easier to remember than my Vultr IP.

Linode cons:

- I'm worried about security.

- Installing OSes other than the available images is hard.

Vultr pros:

- Custom ISOs are nice for those of us who vastly prefer BSD servers.

- So far no security breaches?

- May be slightly faster, but it's hard to say given the OS difference. I suspect it's just DragonFlyBSD being DragonFlyBSD.

Vultr cons:

- Web management is mediocre; Linode's is better designed and shows me more information.

- Young, who knows what their security is actually like.

- A little more expensive for what you get. I don't mind much though.

If any Linode people are reading this, I think I would settle on Linode _IF_ I can get some assurance about security practices. It's a nice service. I like you. It would be extra nice if you roll out some custom ISO thing eventually.

EDIT: Obligatory "not affiliated with either company". Just a dude that wants to host some place for his fossil repos, rsync, and Postgres server. One of these days I'll just maintain my own server on a Free platform (not Intel, not x86_64) and not use any VPS provider.

I loved Linode and used them till about 2014 or so, but switched to Ramnode and then to Vultr. I needed storage more often than performance, I use them to tar mirrored package repositories mainly, and a Linode or Ramnode with double the space of one of those costs a fortune.

I hated everything about Ramnode, but I can't remember specifics. I stuck with Vultr after just setting up some storage instances because it was nice having everything in one spot. I've been able to host some wargames/CTFs as well because of the custom ISO support.

Seems like there's a lot of tinfoil around eye-level here; FYI not a shill and definitely accepting suggestions for other VPS with root, big storage, and custom os/iso options.

I love Vultr. Pretty consistently performs better than competition (like DigitalOcean) for the same price, cheap, haven't had any issues with reliability.

I'd say RamNode is also decent (they do very well in benchmarks) but their support, management and infrastructure is terrible. They were pretty heavily compromised (personal information, passwords etc. leaked) due to a SolusVM vulnerability and refused to remove personal information to prevent it being compromised in the future.

I've had a few instances up on Vultr for nearly a year now and have nothing but good things to say about them. The OS images they use for their instances are, in my experience, almost completely plain-vanilla (which leads to fewer surprises) and the custom ISO functionality is great if you need to launch an instance on an otherwise unsupported OS.

Their instance performance is better than DO in my experience, though I don't know how they compare to Linode.

IME, DigitalOcean performance is usually a little lower than Linode, but some zones seem(ed) to be particularly bad. However, on the zones I do use, reliability on DO in 2016 has been the best of the three. I can hardly remember any outage at all.

Edit: Vultr has been reliable as well, but I've experienced a few outages (not lasting many minutes I think) in the 6 months I've been using them.

I've been running one of their dedicated instance plans (2 CPU / 8GB RAM) for nearly a year now as my play environment.

Overall I've been happy with it, the instance performs up to spec and has had only one downtime event over the year (was down for just over an hour).

Though I don't spend a ton of time using their interface or APIs, it does seem that they are continuously improving them and delivering helpful features.

Vultr's creators (Choopa) have been in the hosting business for nearly 20 years, so not all that surprising actually.

I've used them for about half a dozen instances. No problems at all, and they have very responsive support.

It is not officially supported, but you can run FreeBSD on Linode. I have been able to get FreeBSD (with ZFS), OpenBSD, and NetBSD running on my Linodes. I tried getting SmartOS working but I haven't gotten the configuration right yet.

Using them now for about a year. Really can't find anything to wrong about them

- decent performance (both IO/CPU)

- custom ISOs (yay BSD!)

- elastic IPs

- plenty of locations (so far tried only NY and EU)

- good support

wow they have block storage!