I'm using slicehost and I'm loving it! :)

http://slicehost.com

Those guys are cheap. Kinda scares me a bit that they say they've built everything themselves. How is the control panel? Is there any way to view the real time statistics (cpu, database connections, etc) on your server?

I'm also very happy with SliceHost. But you have to understand the limitations of their offering. They're offering you a blank canvas -- an empty box with a standard Linux distribution installed. It does not have any user-friendly administration tools installed, beyond what comes with the distribution. Instead, they assume that their customers know how to manage servers themselves. If you want more of a GUI, you can install any control panel you want, but you have to install it yourself.

As such, the SliceHost control panel is very minimal. It will display some instantaneous statistics about CPU time, memory usage and network traffic. It also lets you reboot your server and restore from backups or from a standard distribution template. That's about all that it does.

That said, the control panel is very nicely done -- just minimal.

This isn't for everyone, but my personal feeling is that if you're in the market for a VPS, you should be familiar with how to configure it yourself. If you're not already comfortable with Linux system administration and the Unix command line, then I think you're better off with fully managed hosting. I wouldn't want to try and keep a VPS alive and secure without being a proficient Linux sysadmin.

Thanks for the great reply. I'm comfortable setting up cron jobs and some minor aspects of server management. I am looking to take the next step so I have more flexibility but I want to avoid all the work it'll take to customize a 'blank canvas'.

You can get a dedicated box from Layered Tech for about the same price. Same deal though - you run everything yourself.

Not even close to slice's price actually. They start at 99$ for a VPS, which is what we are talking about. Slice starts at 20$.

Yeah, $20 for a way underpowered (256megs?!) system with little storage. I guess that could work if you have a system that you want to scale up little by little, but I'm suspicious of VPS's after having had a few blow up on me and generally perform badly.

When comparing apples to apples, you want to look at LT's specials:

https://order.layeredtech.com/ConfigureServer.lt?method=disp...

Which is $20 setup and $70 a month, which is the same price as the slice system, only with double the storage and your own, real computer.