I agree about the disk access. Disk is by far the weakest part of my system. I do provide you mirrored disk, putting me ahead of the low-end ec2 stuff, but you are sharing that mirror with a lot of people.

Fortunately, more ram can usually make up for slow disk.

I am working on a zfs based network storage system that just might solve the problem and then some, but it's not anywhere near ready yet.

The cool thing about linode is that they hand out free upgrades often, usually ram and storage. I think the storage was 12gb before march for a 20 dollar linode and it got upped and if you look at their blog you'll see a large history of this usually about every six months.

Slicehost does however have very nice and useful articles and it is nice to support them if you use those.

http://www.fsckvps.com/ has similar pricing for OpenVZ based virtual servers.

If you like OpenVZ, I would recommend

http://www.johncompanies.com/

Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly. The Johncompanies people, last time I tried them, were excellent.

"Keeping an OpenVZ VPS running smoothly requires a lot more SysAdmin attention than keeping a Xen VPS running smoothly."

This is really interesting, I'm wondering if you can elaborate a bit?

OpenVZ is a thinner virtualization layer. everyone shares the same kernel. It's resource separation isn't nearly as strong. On the other hand, it is also more efficient. you can reasonably expect to get more total performance out of a OpenVZ system than the same system running xen, but the problem is with OpenVZ, if one user is hogging resources, that user is much more likely to effect other customers than they would be under Xen, with it's non-shared ram and stronger CPU scheduling.

Also, thanks in general for your HN participation and frank and open discussion of your hosting business. I find it really interesting and also helpful the way you classify different types of hosting needs and potential good hosting fits, ( that are not always your own company ;D ). Very cool!

Thanks for the response!

I'm reasonably familiar with OpenVZ and other "container" approaches (zones, jails).

It sounds like there's a missing abstraction layer, or maybe just fewer administrative tools for these container approaches than the built-in-at-time-of-creation attributes of a true virtualized guest.