Anyone care to follow this up with a brief article on the more expensive VPS providers? (such as A Small Orange) Are those of us on Linode, Rackspace Cloud, and Slicehost missing out at all?
Well as someone who has used quite a few VPS servers over the years from a plethora of providers I must say at this point in time Linode is probably the best bang for your buck with all the utilities and uptime it provides. The only thing about Linode is you must not order from the fremont datacenter and you have to subscribe to the status updates to realize what's going on.
The only thing that a more expensive provider will give you that linode does not is server management which can be useful but I don't really mind sysadmin at this point in time so I can't really review that.
+1 to linode - in the past I opted for cheap options, and suffered, but after experiencing the management tools and infrastructure linode has in place, I'll stick with them at the more premium price.
I ran with RootBSD.net for a year or so, and I thought they were awesome. Sharp guys and good support. I even migrated a client's site over to them, saving my client a bundle over unmanaged bare-metal hosting and earning myself some credit for the referral. At the time, I think $20/month was their smallest package, though they may have a $10/month now.
I've had a few Linux VPSs under $3/month (posted specials on lowendbox.com). I agree with the article: don't expect the world for $2/month, back up anything of value frequently, and enjoy the too-good-to-be-true ride while it lasts. The performance is hit-or-miss, you'll find your VPS rebooted more often than you'd like, but for dinking around with an idea, they're perfect.
I'd even be comfortable using these cheap services for backup mail relays or DNS servers. Just don't forget the backups.
Most seem to support PayPal subscription payments, which makes them easy to set up and forget.
Another +1 for Linode. I especially enjoy their DNS management which is included in the price (many providers don't offer/charge more for). They use each of their datacenter presences to redundantly host the DNS zones, so my domains have 5 name servers to fall back on across USA + Europe.
Shh, don't tell them, but given the'll host unlimited domain zone files I even use it to manage a few extra domains that have no zone entries pointing to a linode VPS. They don't seem to check/mind.
