I continue to hear really good things about SoftLayer. Sounds like they are doing something right.

I've yet to find anything they're doing wrong. Honestly a truly amazing hosting company.

Why not just buy a machine and just colo it Softlayer? That way when you do need an additional 8GB, you can pay whatever the current price of 8GB is. These days you can build a 4 to 8 core machine with 16GB ecc memory for around $1500. Hardware is cheap these days... you should be putting most of the money into electricity & bandwidth.

For me it is worth it not to have to deal with it.

For $529/mo I got:

  2x Intel Xeon-Clovertown 5320L-QuadCore [1.86GHz]
  4x Seagate Cheetah ST373455SS (10K SCSI drives)
  Hardware RAID controller
  16GB RAM
  2TB transfer per month.
  100Mbps uplink
  Peace of mind

Sure I could get everything but that last item for less. There is an inflection point where it is more economical to run my own hardware again but I'm not there. For a few hundred more than cost when issues occur a competent support person is helping me within minutes.

When (not if) there are issues with my servers, driving to a colo would eat my savings. When you have a hardware issue at softlayer they fix it. They don't have to wait for new hardware as they have a stock.

I'd rather be spending my time coding and working on features. Having your own non-mission colo-ed box is awesome, but the cases where dedicated leasing or AWS doesn't make sense are fewer and fewer for bootstrapers.

Note: userscripts.org is 3 years old. It ran on a colo-ed box for a year. Then a $200 serverbeach box. But it just outgrew that ( http://userscripts.org/articles/22-2008-overview for 2008 review with stats )

If you really want something that is peace-of-mind, you should just use something like rightscale.com. We have a giant ad server on there load balanced across 40 ec2 instances running perl code, seems to work well so far. Sometimes an instance will get fussy and we'll just create a new one from scratch by running scripts that essentially fetch everything needed from CPAN and installs, configures, and boots in one step. It's definitely a more expensive solution, but if you want peace of mind, that's probably the way to go.

On top of their specials, you can also negotiate better deals with them.

You can but it helps to know their online offers.

About a year ago I spent many hours talking with a rep who came back with the same boxes and prices we could have configured with their online system.

Last week I spent a couple hours chatting with a rep for userscripts.org's new box and he did better than the online prices.

I think the difference last year I approached with general requirements, so they spent all their time speccing out multiple systems and figuring out what was the best fit. My second experience I knew what I wanted, so I was able to ask for deals based on specific hardware choices.

Now that sound like a good deal