That's true. On the other hand, Linode is competitive on price and service. Every ticket I've submitted has gotten a response within a couple hours. That's pretty good considering how much I'm paying. Honestly, I don't know why someone would get a vps from a different company.

I'm happy you are happy, and am not trying to convert you to Slicehost. That said, a bit on my thought process: I've been with them for years, switching costs are non-trivial in terms of my time (and switching could break stuff), and I have absolute and total confidence in them to treat me well.

I just checked my email. In the last year, I've had three incidents with Slicehost, all connected to issues experienced when migrating VPSes. All were resolved in minutes.

Not to knock Linode, or Rackspace Cloud, or EC2, or whatever, but none of them have ever been in the foxhole with me at 3 AM when the server was down and got it back up before customers noticed.

I think both have great support. They both have active and lively IRC channels where staff hang out. It's usually very quick to resolve issues with slicehost and linode.

The pain point for me at slicehost was bandwidth - they charge a lot, linode charge a little. Also far more options on linode etc etc once I moved that all added up to a better experience.

I haven't checked for a while, but when I compared Slicehost and Linode pricing, they were about the same. I stayed on Slicehost for that reason. Slicehost has been great to me, and I like their IRC channel. I see no reason to switch. I guess I'll go compare again soon and if there's a big difference I'll be obliged to switch (very poor), but I haven't had any trouble with Slicehost.

With this new change - SliceHost is now about TWICE as expensive.

I have had the same experience. I have only had to contact them twice, but they were pretty responsive.

Same here. Great support after one of my user accounts was hacked because of poor password selection.

No, price isn't everything. CPU and IO performance matters also: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

Excellent comparison, and jibes with my own experience switching from Slicehost to Linode -- noticeably improved performance in CPU and IO. I've started recommending Linode, and now that they've upped the RAM, I will recommend them even more.

What is preferable about Slicehost compared to Linode? They seem extremely similar to me (I've researched it a fair amount), except that Linode's prices are way better.

I've been with Linode for over a year and never regretted it. This RAM upgrade and a disk space upgrade earlier certainly help!

I think that many choose Slicehost because they don't care about price all that much and/or believe it will be more stable (which may or may not be true)

I, for one, prefer to use VPS that is cheaper than that, offers more traffic and I believe will still be good enough.

I'm sure knowing that it's backed by Rackspace is reassuring for some people.

...despite Rackspace's well-publicized downtime, which has prompted prominent sites to move away from them?

One of my local competitors recently, proudly, informed me that they were about to launch a new hosting service supported by Rackspace. I smiled, and congratulated them, and started planning the marketing campaign I'd like to run when Rackspace goes down and takes my competitors' clients with them.

Well, in a word, yes. Everyone has downtime. Rackspace's downtime just makes more noise because lots of well-known sites are hosted there.

> Everyone has downtime.

http://reports.panopta.com/cloudharmony/

> Rackspace's downtime just makes more noise because lots of well-known sites are hosted there.

Not as many as there used to be.

I don't mean to be a jerk, but it's one thing when my site goes down because I did something dumb, and a whole 'nother thing when a site goes down, these days, because a data center is having a problem. I just don't understand why someone would assume that downtime was inevitable and not choose to minimize that risk as much as possible.

Some would suggest that the best way to minimize that risk is not to look at who hasn't had downtime in the last two years, but instead to host your app with more than one provider.

(of course, if you take that route, you probably want to go with two different low-cost providers.)

Everyone has downtime that isn't their fault.

And, oddly, according to your link Rackspace Cloud Dallas has 100% uptime which 1) I don't think is true and 2) doesn't seem to support your point.

It's true that price isn't everything, and to some degree, web hosting is a funny market: it's really easy/visible to compete on price/features, but you only notice the service when things go awry (at least for someone like me who doesn't particularly need hand holding), and then you really want to be dealing with people who know their stuff and take their jobs seriously.

That said, I've never got the impression Linode was giving me anything less in terms of service than similar outfits.

With the 512MB Slice, you're paying around $18/mo more than the lowest end Linode for very similar features. What exactly do you get for that $18?