Softlayer also introduced a London region a few hours ago. http://blog.softlayer.com/2014/london-just-got-cloudier%E2%8...

And cheaper if you use a lot of bandwidth. They throw in 5 TB of outbound with their cheapest VPS. ~$28/mo compared to $70 with DO.

But if you don't, it is pretty expensive:

80$/mo DO: 8GB RAM, 4 Core, 80GB disk, 5TB

163$/mo Softlayer: 8GB RAM, 4 Core, 100GB storage, 5TB

While this is huge news there's a lot to be done in this space, and it has only recently started to gain momentum.

For the past couple of years we've been busy building Socialance, sort of like a hybrid if oDesk & LinkedIn. A site where you can hire people recommended by your network.

I know building a marketplace is an extremely challenging task, but we've come this far, we're going to see it through.

It seems plenty of you are heavy users of either site, or have strong opinions about the sector. If you want to help out my email is guillermo@socialance.com (we're bootstrapped, took part in Startup Chile and are based in London).

If it sounds like something might be interested in using, please drop your mail at http://Socialance.com

I've tried most of the freelance marketplaces out there and IMHO there's a lot more that could be done.

That's why we're developing http://www.socialance.com If you have any suggestions or want to help, let me know: guillermo@socialance.com

All online freelance marketplaces suffer from some variation of this problem. Either unskilled workers, generic bids, unverified skills, spam..

As @wilfra and others say you can try to filter by hourly rate or target freelancers in certain countries and you're bound to find someone good. And when you do it's a good idea to keep them on speed dial. You should also definitely look at the monthly threads here on HN of people looking for freelance work.

We've had the same problem you're in and decided to do something about it by creating http://socialance.com - A site that aims to fix online freelancing.

If anyone wants to help us shape the future of freelancing, please get in touch!

The spell checker used to be great. It was a one-click feature (even if you needed to change language). Now, with the "improved UI" it's hidden away under a drop down menu, which on click brings yet another floating menu where you have to click a second arrow to change language. It's a mess. I hope they don't take away the old compose UI.

Great stuff! Beautiful flat design and the app runs very smoothly :)

Yep, looks like they got something wrong there!

Heheheh, brilliant stuff. Loved the double stealth :D

Here's a side by side comparison without comments:

http://cl.ly/3Z3l1w0v2I2n2y231Y09/o

That's 10 lines more. 100 times more readable.

Well actually 15, as it seems fair to remove the comments in Snow too. About it being readable, I think that has a lot to do with experience. For me the Snow version is clear as day ;)

Well the comments in Snow are kinda necessary, since it's all abbreviated and hard to read. The PHP class in the other hand is a lot clearer, with informative class and function names.