When researching VPS's to host websites a few months ago I came across SliceHost who were very highly regarded but had a long waiting list, with waiting times measured in weeks unless you were willing to commit to a top range deal for a year in advance.
Hence I went with vpslink and a 512Mb VPS. Vpslink are cheap but have the limitation that you get no 'burst' ram so if your 512M runs out then phut, apache crashes. This was happening to me until I changed from the preforking apache to the multithreaded one that uses less memory (fewer processes) after which it was rock solid. However, I no longer trusted it.
Last Saturday I was still mulling over hosting and checked Slicehost again to find that their waiting times were down to less than a week for all their packages. Their prices are slightly better than VPSlink so I applied for one and by tuesday I got an email with a link to sign up. Signing up was easy enough and within minutes I had 1024Mb slice for three months.
My first impression when I logged into it with ssh was that it was very fast. Typing into the console, the keypresses appeared immediately. In a way it's a detail but it shows there is low latency between me and the server (I'm not sure where the server is but I saw something about swbell in the iptables which makes me suspect it is in sw USA). Everything I did with it (installing packages etc) happened very quickly.
But the thing that impressed me most was... the documentation on their site. Very good indeed, great guides on setting up servers for Apache, Rails, Mongrel, iptables etc. Simple step-by-step instructions to go from a raw OS install (ubuntu gutsy for me) to a running site. Other hosting services I have used have had scrappy and out-of-date documents (oneandone) or I had to spend ages trawling forums for answers (site5: and with a shared hosting service like site5 setting anything up is intrinsically more difficult because of the shared hosting shackles). Slicehost appears to be a 'run-by-developers-for-developers' deal and feels very web 2 and geeky. Perfect.
Armed with the documentation my site is running under apache with a mongrel cluster serving up my rails app! And it is running very nicely, very snappy. The mongrel cluster is using 10% of my memory under zero load (I wouldn't dare do this on vpslink) and setting it up is not the most straightforward thing and I couldn't do it again without the slicehost docs. I would ditch apache and use pure mongrel but:
- apache makes virtual sites very easy
- if I ever wanted to move one of my drupal sites to this server I would need php and apache's url rewriting facilities (to get the clean urls working: the 'new wave' servers like lighttpd are great for serving static files but have too many shortcomings for anything beyond that).
- I want multiple rails apps and I'm unsure whether mongrel can do that (I've been bitten by cherrypy and it's one-site-under-mod-python ethos so don't trust anything else yet).
So far Slicehost is looking very promising. And no, there are no referral links here. Vpslink are good but their slightly more expensive spry brand VPS's may be better for reliability. There aren't any other vps providers that I would consider. They are either the pile-high-sell-cheap types (oneandone) or poor/terse support (linode).
Petersblog is still on site5/drupal. Maybe, just maybe, I can make it my christmas holiday project to port it to rails. Maybe.
Peter's Moblog
Peter, I would take a look at linode.com. I had a buddy head down the same path you are, I had been a linode customer for two years. He tried slicehost and they had some growing pains. He switched within the first month over to linode and has been happy ever since.
I don't work for linode or get paid to make any recommendations. I am just a happy customer passing along what I found out that works for me. :)