To be fair, that applies to any hosting, cheap or expensive, virtual or dedicated. I've only once had to restore data due to the fault of the host, but I've lost track of the number of times that I've had to get things back because of a user error. :)
I would recommend someone a Low End Box over a free Amazon Micro Instance any day, just because the CPU they limit you at is just bad. You start Apache or Nginx on those things or do a big yum install/apt-get and the terminal slows to a crawl.
Running a Production server off any low end box is definitely risky depending on who you're hosting with, but that goes without saying. I'd second BuyVM and Xen, I had a VPS with nordic and my cluster just died one day and was unrecoverable. They gave me a free small instance for half a year, but I opted to just switch instead.
My other recommendation is definitely Rackspace. Their low end service is only around 10 dollars a month, their chat support service is pretty good, and its fast and easy to scale. Database transactions on the cloud are still shit however. :( Really want a dedicated server if you're a larger or badly optimized site.
He does a serious amount of caching (obviously) and offloaded all assets to S3, but it looks like it is still possible.
FWIW, I am still skeptical given the amount of complaints you see about the Micros on the EC2 forums regularly. He could have just gotten lucky I suppose (as far as his neighbors on the host).
Also noticed while speed-testing the different nodes the CA connection (to Tucson, AZ) is phenomenally fast, but to PA about half the speed and to EU it drops quite a bit again.
When I do the speed tests for Linode using similar locations they all perform fairly well, same goes for AWS.
I must clarify that my experience was related to their regular VPS offerings.
They do offer a premium VPS (notice how its product descriptions mention "1GBPS port" and "Less than 50% load of budget VPS nodes", in contrast to just "XXX GB/MONTH" for the regular).
I didn't try their dedicated servers. They may have fatter pipes. I just had very poor latency, consistent with all their locations, being Florida the most stable for me.
If you do any sort of data crunching, you can get a good value for your buck. Certainly cheaper than AWS.
For my taste, Linode's latency has been pleasantly consistent. 95% of the time, it equals 142ms from Atlanta to South America (so far, the best I've found). I just wish they had a smaller offering.
I'll go back to watching the presidential election, have a nice day!
Hurricane Electric in Fremont has had issues with power and previously with wide-scale IP block blacklisting due to widespread illegality (bot nets, etc) running on equipment in their Datacenter.
It might be fine now, I'm not sure, but there's a ton of DC's out there where this has NEVER been a problem, so I fail to see why I'd want to stick my assets there.
While there is certainly a huge amount of fanboyism surrounding buyvm, most of it comes from the stock scarcity.
I personally run 3 vps' with them (first three plans) and the performance has always been far more than acceptable. I run an adult tube site that has exploded in popularity due to a fun domain name and being one of the first to post a leaked sex tape for a latin american actress. It can reach around 200 to 300 thousand uniques per month. Never had a load issue.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I could have ended up in a lousy node. Many people outright abuse their service for portscanning, spam sending and what not. Also, many people won't do this intentionally; they get infected through ancient wordpress installations.
My experience has been worse with Burst. Their IO is acceptable but their network is dismal. Ping times from aroud the world tend to confirm this.
Notes to take home:
ALWAYS make backups! If a provider goes deadool on you all of the sudden, you should always have fresh backups in a remote site. Honestly, there's no excuse these days. You can always get your money back if you file a dispute on Paypal. I wasn't affected by the collossal Hostrail crash, but many people were.
Lastly, always choose Xen over Openvz.
Edit: Forgot to add something very important: Avoid Hurricane Electric (he.net) like the plague. They are an absolute fuck up of a datacenter.