
Ask HN: Prgmr is unreliable. Please advise on VPS hosting. - revorad
I've been using prgmr.com to host a web application in beta mode. I didn't want to spend a lot of money before I get any serious users, so I went with what seemed the cheapest option but still gave value for money.<p>My experience has been OK, except for one thing - they are completely unresponsive. I know their motto is "We don't assume you are stupid." but charging people money for a service and not providing any support is just rubbish. I've emailed them with some questions in the past and they never get back. A while ago they started issuing ticket numbers and I thought they must be improving the service, but they still never get back.<p>Last couple of days, my server has gone down a few times. It went down again this morning. Now I can access the root domain, but not the subdomains. I have written to prgmr support and I got my ticket number. But I'm not expecting any real help.<p>I know this is a bit desperate but I'm hoping HN user lsc (who runs prgmr) will take note of this.<p>Meanwhile, can I ask you to advise me on choosing another VPS host? I know Linode and Slicehost are the most recommended ones here. Given the prices, I might go in for Linode but I'm wondering if any of you have advice on running a beta cheaply until launching a product.<p>Sorry for the rant. This is my first time running a VPS server. I'd appreciate any help.<p>EDIT: Thanks a lot for your responses everyone. In addition to Linode, a few other good alternatives have been suggested which I will look into.<p>I have managed to get my server up again now and also got a response from prgmr. It's a shame that I had to do this publicly, I don't mean to defame prgmr. But I think it's worth pointing out that this is possibly one bad feature of competing on price.
======
lsc
we got a ticket from you at Tue Jun 15 03:51:50 2010

we sent a response at Tue Jun 15 06:25:58 2010

that's what, a little more than two and a half hours in what is the middle of
the night for me?

This is a /whole lot/ better than I would expect my response time to be in the
middle of the night. If you are disappointed with this response time, I have
utterly failed to set expectations. email me and I'll refund your last month
and you can go over to Slicehost or what have you.

Slicehost and linode both pride themselves on support. Slicehost has phone
support, and from what I hear, they might help you with your apache problem,
too. I met some of the slicehost support people at a xen conference a few
months back, and it sounds like they really go the extra mile... so for you,
the extra they charge might be more than worth it.

email me and I'll get you a refund of your last month as per policy.

(Note, you don't need to post a HN story to get a refund of your last month,
I'll do that for anyone who asks.)

~~~
revorad
Luke, thanks for your response. I don't want a refund. I will email you.

------
techiferous
Linode is pretty solid. They have had about 2(?) outages in the past year or
so that I can remember. I've been using Linode since 2008 and am happy.

~~~
mgrouchy
I have a linode for my totally inactive blog and a small project I am working
on. We also just migrated all our servers for SWIX to linode VPS's. All in all
linode has been a pretty great experience.

The linode library is pretty helpful too, especially if you are fairly new to
linux or systems administration.

------
mdasen
I'd recommend ChunkHost. You can sign up for their free beta. I'm a paying
customer of their's and have had only minor problems. To clarify that, they
had a scheduled maintenance a while back that involved a reboot of the
instances and I had forgotten to set nginx to start at boot, but they'd
communicated the maintenance window long in advance of the maintenance and so
I knew to check to make sure it was up and it was a good thing to fix in
general.

Their prices are very reasonable, they have a nice, simple online management
thing that lets you deal with DNS, re-imaging chunks, etc.

I have used/do use: EC2, Slicehost/Rackspace Cloud, Linode, and prgmr.

I found prgmr to be a pain. There are just some small things that make
administration so much easier.

Slicehost/Rackspace has gotten expensive compared to the competition, but
they're pretty rock solid.

EC2 has some wonderful features, but it doesn't go down to the cheap levels I
want for my personal hosting.

 _Linode is always a great performer_ and the only reason I'm not with them is
that I'm getting a better price at ChunkHost. While I haven't had problems
with ChunkHost, Linode is a larger player if you're looking for business
hosting you can sell to your boss. As others will tell you, it's easy to
recommend Linode.

~~~
whimsy
>I found prgmr to be a pain. There are just some small things that make
administration so much easier.

I bet lsc would be interested in your feedback if you sent him an e-mail.

Maybe not, but maybe.

~~~
lsc
I would certainly be interested in hearing it; I can't promise I'd implement,
though. I am most interested in implementing things that make it /possible/
for a user to deal with problems without my help. I am less interested in
things that make it /easy/ for a user to deal with problems without my help.
Also, there is a long queue of improvements I currently need, some of which
are quite critical.

------
liangzan
I'm a happy customer of Slicehost. Their customer service is top notch. The
few times when I needed help, I went to their chatroom and people were there
to help immediately. They really do man the chatrooms. Very responsive and
helpful. It's not easy to maintain such high standards for years.

Their articles is another plus point. It's constantly updated. It covers most
of the things you need. No doubt they are not the cheapest. But their customer
service more than makes up for it.

------
sjs382
I've had a great experience with prgmr.com, even when asking them possibly-
stupid questions about my configuration. If you can get to one domain but not
others on a VPS account, it's likely not the VPS provider's fault...

~~~
commandar
>If you can get to one domain but not others on a VPS account, it's likely not
the VPS provider's fault...

Yeah, was gonna say - a VPS provider's job is to make sure you have a running
box and a good pipe to it. This is almost surely a configuration issue on the
VPS and not the provider's fault.

~~~
revorad
I agree but what happened is that the server did go down and initially I could
not access any of my sites, including root domains. Then the server seemed to
have come back to life, but the subdomains still weren't working. That turned
out to be some Apache issue, which I resolved by restarting it.

~~~
commandar
Which confirms what I said -- the issue you were complaining about was a
problem with _your configuration_ , not with the VPS provider. No provider
guarantees 100% uptime, and you have to be able to handle things when there is
an outage. The root domain going down _was_ their problem, your subdomains not
coming back afterward wasn't.

~~~
revorad
I know well that one can't expect 100% uptime. But I have had a few outages
since yesterday. Even so, my main problem with prgmr is not the hardware but
their almost complete lack of support.

~~~
commandar
I think the point is the fact that you're conflating what definitely appear to
be configuration issues with provider issues seems to indicate that your
expectations for support may be a bit unrealistic, especially for a provider
like prgmr that specifically advertise themselves as being for users who
_will_ be able to identify the difference between the two.

I certainly understand your frustration, but I think the heart of the matter
is that prgmr may be inappropriate for your needs rather than "prgmr is
unreliable." I feel like they're quite clear about the fact that they're not
for everyone.

------
piers
Try rackspacecloud servers (<http://www.rackspacecloud.com>) - uses pretty
much the same backend as slicehost (slicehost owned by rackspace). I find them
cheaper as it's not a fixed cost, but pay as you go.

~~~
_neil
This. I've setup several client servers on slicehost in the past 6 months and
they have been solid. More recently, I've put a couple clients on rackspace
cloud because the SLA will make the client feel more comfortable. It's been
equally solid.

------
mbenjaminsmith
I've had good luck with webfaction. I've only been using them for a couple
months, but the one time I had an issue they were very quick to respond.

They're big on Django and I guess Ruby (don't use it). No problems getting a
Django site up and running. No issues installing packages or other software in
my user account.

~~~
j_baker
Indeed. Webfaction is great for a budget plan. But it isn't an actual VPS. You
can do most of the stuff you'd want to do with a VPS, but you don't get root
access. Plus, their higher-level plans aren't that great.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
That's right. I'm in the habit of conflating VPS with shared hosting.

------
jey
> This is my first time running a VPS server.

No offense, but it sounds like prgmr isn't for you. When they say "we don't
assume you're stupid" they're really trying to say "we assume you won't call
us for help, so we have low prices".

~~~
dagw
There is a huge difference between calling for help with setting up your VPS
and calling to ask why their servers are down and when one can expect them to
be up again. I can understand that they won't handle the first type of call,
but I damn well expect them to handle the second.

~~~
AndrewLuecke
Yes, except in this case, he claims the root domain works, but not his
subdomains. If he only has 1x VPS, this means he has messed up his own
configuration. Prgmr/Linode are paid to offer a service, but if you want them
to administer your server, you should probably use shared hosting, or pay for
a qualified server administrator

~~~
flamontagne
There are a lot of cheap VPS providers out there. You might be interested in
trying burst.net : <https://www.burst.net/linvps.shtml>

------
joss82
Gandi is quite good (but based in France). I'm using their VPS hosting service
since March and it's flawless (12€/month, and you can take advantage of the
cheap euro if you're in the US). 3 months is too short to have a solid
opinion, but I've been using their DNS service for years without any trouble.

Their motto is: "No bullshit"

<http://en.gandi.net/hebergement/>

~~~
michele
I use Gandi for domains (not VPS) and while it works ok, support is not very
good. I've had tickets going unreplied for a couple of weeks which IMHO is
absolutely unacceptable from a big company like Gandi (actually, I believe
it's unacceptable from anyone). So from my experience with them I can assume
they might provide you with a good service as long as you don't need to get in
touch with their support team.

I've been a Slicehost user in the past and really liked their service.

------
parfe
Your post is incredibly unfair to Prgmr. You are obviously not great at server
administration and you seem to imply that you are requesting server
administration support.

All Prmgr promises is that they'll keep your VPS running most of the time.
It's on you to maintain it. Not only that but you know lsc is on the west
coast and you posted this article while he was still in bed. If your slice is
running, lsc is doing his job.

Apache configuration issues are on you.

~~~
revorad
The server actually went down. I could not even ssh into it. I know I am not
great at server admin but if it were just Apache config issues I wouldn't make
such a big deal out of it.

Like I've said elsewhere, my beef with prgmr is not the servers or uptime, but
rather their poor customer support. That's what I mean by "unreliable". It may
seem quite desperate, but complaining on a public forum was my last resort to
get any attention on the issue.

I appreciate it must be hard to run a single-man company (I know I run one
too), but at least one needs to communicate with the customers.

~~~
parfe
Were your support requests related to the server going down? Was that
happening that often? Or were they for server admin support? Because you make
it seem that only recently did the machine start dying.

From what I've read you seem to be a nightmare customer. Not only expecting a
service you aren't paying for, but complaining about it in a public forum when
things don't go your way.

>I know their motto is "We don't assume you are stupid." but charging people
money for a service and not providing any support is just rubbish. I've
emailed them with some questions in the past and they never get back. A while
ago they started issuing ticket numbers and I thought they must be improving
the service, but they still never get back.

Are you saying here you are sending support requests because your server is
malfunctioning/down or are you requesting server administration support?

Honestly, you signed up for a service that openly states that you are expected
to run your own machine and then you complain on a professional forum that the
company owner is hand holding you.

~~~
revorad
_From what I've read you seem to be a nightmare customer. Not only expecting a
service you aren't paying for, but complaining about it in a public forum when
things don't go your way._

Service I'm not paying for? Come on, now that's not true.

I've sent support requests for a number of issues in the past and today for
the server being down. Are you saying I should expect to be ignored?

 _Honestly, you signed up for a service that openly states that you are
expected to run your own machine_

I have been running my own machine, even though I am no pro server admin. But
surely I have the right to ask about downtime and other issues which are not
in my hand.

~~~
parfe
>Service I'm not paying for? Come on, now that's not true.

You are paying for a hosted VPS. Not a managed server. If you need help
managing a server you should pay for that.

>But surely I have the right to ask about downtime and other issues which are
not in my hand.

Other than downtime (Which of course is perfectly acceptable to complain
about) you still are alluding to trying to get server admin support from a VPS
provider. What other kinds of VPS hosting issues did you run into? I'm
curious. Of course you could just apologize for trash talking a VPS provider
for not providing you managed server support.

------
corin_
Not had any issues with pgrmr support or reliability myself, but can't
recomend linode/slicehost enough - personally slightly prefer slicehost, but
use linode as well since slicehost don't have UK servers.

edit: oh, and possibly consider www.ovh.co.uk, a French company. Never used
them myself, and don't know how good their VPS servers are, but have heard
many endorsements for their dedi servers (and their prices are very cheap)

~~~
revorad
Thanks, I hadn't heard of ovh. My concern with going with someone like that is
I don't know how much better the support will be than prgmr. I think I should
just stop acting cheap and go with Linode.

~~~
corin_
What kind of support are you going to be wanting?

~~~
revorad
Well, basically if something goes wrong (e.g. server goes down a few times in
2 days), then at least someone I can talk to, ask what's happening instead of
a wall of silence? I don't need phone support, even email is fine as long as I
am not ignored.

~~~
corin_
Slicehost/Linode are both fine for that, will ask a friend about OVH

------
uggedal
Since I wrote my article (<http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-
comparison>) comparing VPS performance last fall Linode has had two network
outages in their Newark data center which have affected <http://wasitup.com>.
Other than the network glitches their hardware have been 100% stable (I'm
currently running on 4 different physical machines).

------
nerfhammer
My experience with linode:

* Customer for ~4 years

* At one point my server catastrophically failed

* No backups. Or, now it's an add-on for an extra fee. See point above.

* They don't offer support for much... officially. But they make their internal IRC channel public so if you go in there and ask they'll just help you anyway.

------
andrewtj
Have you emailed Luke about your discontent?

<http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Complaints>

~~~
revorad
I haven't emailed Luke this time, but I have in the past. I have never been
rude to him or his staff, but I should email him now regarding my discontent.

------
AndrewLuecke
Firstly, if you can access your root domain, but not the subdomains, you have
configured something wrong (unless you are using multiple IP's). That's YOUR
fault, and neither Prgmr or Linode is likely to help much there (although in
both cases, people in the channels are more than happy to provide some
suggestions).

Now, in regards to stability, I find both to be equal. The difference is, that
for the cost of 1x Linode, you could buy 2x Prgmr nodes in different location
and run them simultaneously to provide much better stability.

Maybe you should jump onto IRC, but from the sounds of things, you may not
have the experience to administer a Prgmr Node. Linode is easier to learn
with, but is much more expensive

Just onto Freenode IRC / #prgmr, and people will help. But honestly, there was
a short server outage a month ago, but your current server issues are likely
configuration faults on your side.

------
dan_sim
I was about to write something similar about prgmr. They just don't care.

In our case, we just got bored of _all_ VPS providers and took a dedicated
server. Take the time to compare a VPS to a dedicated server and you may have
a few surprises. My current server is 80$/month and a similar one on Slicehost
would be 250$/month.

~~~
revorad
What dedicated server are you using? Care to give more details?

~~~
dan_sim
We're on <http://www.iweb.com>

------
reginaldo
I know that's not quite what you're looking for, but I use
<http://www.lowendbox.com/> to look for good deals on VPS (they have coupons)
and <http://www.lowenddedi.net/> when I want a dedicated server... At
lowendbox, I found <http://www.quickweb.co.nz> (they're based in New Zealand
but my VPS is in the US). I'm paying $4.95 for a 256M ram/20GB disk. Quickweb
is very good and have awesome support.

Also, because they're in New Zealand, you can ask for stuff late at night (in
the US) and they'll answer promptly.

Depending on what you want, <http://prq.se/> might also be a good choice.

~~~
lsc
Lowendbox is a great place to look for /cheap/ providers; I'd suggest that the
OP should look at something a bit more up market.

~~~
reginaldo
Yes, I totally agree with you. That's what I meant with "that's not quite what
you're looking for". I just hope someone who searches for "vps
site:ycombinator.com" finds this...

------
gst
I'm quite satisfied with proPlay (<https://www.proplay.biz/>).

Advantages: \- Rock-stable (didn't have any issues so far) \- Cheap (e.g., for
3 Euros a month you get a vServer with 384 MB RAM and 8 GB harddisk) \- Non-
Enterprisy: Support is available via IRC instead of an useless callcenter

Disadvantages: \- It seems to be a one-man company. However, it has been in
business since 2003 \- They are based in Germany. So from the US the latency
to their servers is somewhat higher than a US-based provider and their
websites are primarily in German

If you check them out have a look at their "vps premium" offers. they are even
cheaper then the offers that you find directly on the mainpage.

------
jtdowney
I have personally had a great experience with Linode. Though depending on how
much bandwidth you use it might be cheaper to go with Rackspace Cloud over
Slicehost/Linode.

~~~
revorad
Bandwidth and memory usage is something I don't know how to find out myself. I
have asked prgmr support about my bandwidth usage, but again no response. How
do you estimate yours?

~~~
alec
I like vnstat: <http://humdi.net/vnstat/>. It's easy to set up and has almost
zero overhead. I have it send me an email from cron estimating monthly usage
once a week. It won't break things down per-process, per-port, or per-remote-
host, but I haven't found a nice tool to do that yet.

~~~
revorad
Thanks, that looks useful. I will give it a go.

------
kwyjibo
In europe: ovh, gandi, or hetzner (they will also offer VPS soon). They are
cheaper than rackspace, linode, etc... , and it's not a 2 man shop.

------
lazyant
I use rimuhosting.com and rackspacecloud.com, happy with both.

~~~
bradleyland
I have to add my support for Rimuhosting. I have accumulated nine VPS
instances with them over the last three years, and I have never, not even
once, experienced an outage. We use an independent monitoring service to keep
track of all of our services, so I receive alerts when a service goes down. I
know this all to well because of some lingering services we had with
MediaTemple for too long.

The upsides of Rimuhosting are:

* Stellar support. No really, _stellar_ support. Their techs know what they're doing, and they respond quickly * Flexible plans - choose your own distro, VPS size, even semi-dedicated plans in between shared VPS and dedicated servers. * Did I mention the support rocks.

A lot of what I know about system administration, I learned from Rimuhosting
techs. Not only do they fix what needs to be fixed, but they send you a great
summary of the steps they took, complete with copy/paste from the command
line. It's a classic "teach a man to fish" approach to support. They've
spoiled me so badly that I get a little upset when I receive terse "problem
resolved" responses from other companies.

I can't say enough good things about them. They're worth every penny they
charge.

~~~
jtheory
I'm also a Rimuhosting customer, with a single VPS I've been gradually scaling
up -- I've had very smooth sailing in terms of reliability over the past few
years, they offer a discount if you participate in any OSS development, and
the techs have been a great help in resolving the questions I've had while
getting everything set up how I want it.

I've also noticed that periodically when I'm researching server setup-related
questions, Google points me to their resource pages, which seems like a good
sign.

------
nanijoe
Try chunkhost.com , I currently pay $9.50 for a 512MB/20GB VPS

~~~
mattyb
I'm seeing $19.00/month on the site, how'd you manage that?

~~~
j_baker
If you sign up during beta, they give you a lifetime discount (chosen
randomly) when you start paying. When I did it, the max discount was 30%, but
they might have increased the discount since then.

------
andrewtj
_I have managed to get my server up again now and also got a response from
prgmr._

What was the issue?

~~~
revorad
Only thing I know is that the server went down and initially I could not
access any of my sites, including root domains. Then the server seemed to have
come back to life. I could ssh in and see my primary domain, but the
subdomains still weren't working. That turned out to be some Apache issue,
which I resolved by restarting it.

I got a reply from support at prgmr but haven't been able to trace down what
exactly happened.

~~~
andrewtj
It seems you have over-estimated your system administration skills and expect
prgmr to compensate, even though that's clearly not the business they're in.
Frankly, this thread reflects pretty badly on your ability to take personal
responsibility for your business.

------
rkalla
I have used RimuHosting, VPS.net, Slicehost and EC2.

Slicehost and RimuHosting by far have the best customer-service experience. I
really liked the _idea_ of slicehost, but unfortunately in practice trying to
scale up a 4GB instance to an 8GB instance to handle load isn't fast-enough to
actually be a great production strategy -- your VM contents are effectively
copied to another machine and booted in it's place, so if you have a ton of
small files, that copy operation will take a long time, especially if the
server is getting hammered.

Also, you cannot scale beyond the 15.5GB instance because it is 1 physical
server. So if you have potential massive growth down the road, you'll have to
look into load-balancing.

As for cost, I disagree with the few that said Slicehost was expensive -- in
our experience it was a lot cheaper than EC2 -- go ahead and price out
comparable VM's on EC2 _and_ don't forget the bandwidth, that is where they
get you.

Unfortunately we didn't stay with Slicehost because of 2 VM host failures in 2
months. About 3-4hours of complete outages both times and 1 time our VM failed
for no reason... it was really frustrating to have all these mysterious issues
and it seemed there was no "fix" for these things... they were just god's will
or something, who knows.

We moved to VPS.net next and it was great, for 12hrs... in the following week
we had 2 mysterious complete failures of our VPS (tried, 4, 8 and 12-node
configurations IIRC) and each time the 1st tier support would respond with
"Our server admins are looking into it and will get back to your shortly", and
then another 3 hours of down time before a useless "Ok, your VM has been
restarted" response... that's it... no identification as to why the failure
occurred so often or what was going on.

Again, another great idea "in theory" that just ended up sucking for us.
However, if you need massive scalability, VPS.net will let you scale your
individual VMs up to like 64 "nodes" -- which comes out to some insanely large
machine.

To their credit, I got tweets and emails from the CEO and head of CS to help
me after I blogged about the experience... but it is one of those "thanks but
no thanks" situations...I didn't want to keep doing that dance with failing
servers.

I eventually ended up BACK on RimuHosting -- 2 years prior we had left to try
and find a more easily scalable VPS platform after no downtime on Rimu. We got
dazzled by these other AJAX-enabled management sites and so on... Rimu has a
very simple/ugly web interface, but an incredibly responsive team of very very
smart people all dedicated to server stuff... and in the end we just couldn't
come close to replacing that with _real world_ experience on high-load sites
(Dugg, slashdotted, etc.)

That being said, there are a lot of options Rimu doesn't advertise on their
site well that make it one of the cheapest hosting solutions out there... like
going over 2TB of bandwidth a month in their Dallas center only costs $0.10/GB
-- Amazon is $0.15/GB

They can also scale you up to an 8-core, 72GB monster dedicated server on the
high end for $1k/month -- price that same thing out on EC2 with the same
allocated bandwidth and it's like $1700 even with the reserved instances.

Then you throw the really responsive customer support that is willing to do
almost anything reasonable for you for free (including configing/installing
software, etc.) and even though they have no sexy AJAX on their site, my life
is a lot easier hosting with them.

We do all our serving through them, even stuff we have to scale over time with
growing VPS accounts -- if you need custom setups that aren't on their site,
just ask. They'll likely toss it together for you.

\--- Hope that helps, I know you have a lot of feedback to read.

~~~
jreposa
I completely agree with your point about Slicehost resizing not being a great
production strategy.

Our app servers (on Slicehost) were getting hammered yesterday, so I issue a
resize (1GB -> 2GB). After about 20 minutes it gets to about 97% and then
stalls. In a panic I log into the server and kill all the apache2 instances. I
look at the Slicehost console again and it says 40%. It actually started over.
By the time it actually restarted with the resized slice it was over an hour
later. The traffic was already gone by the time the resize finished.

------
sayhello
I've used linode for a short while and am still using slicehost. If your apps
are disk I/O heavy, go for slicehost, if you're looking for more RAM, linode
may be a good choice. My stuff was not CPU heavy at the time, so I have no
comments on that, but linode seemed pretty fast.

I left linode because I kept getting emails from linode support about disk
I/O, and that was for an initial import of a 50GB postgres db.

After that, I kept getting emails from them once in a while, when my app was
getting disk I/O busy. I can't run a business with these worries in my mind.

Slicehost is and has been working great for me, and they have great support.

~~~
davidw
Is this the email that states:

 _This is not meant as a warning or a representation that you are misusing
your resources. We encourage you to modify the thresholds based on your own
individual needs._

You bailed out because of that?

~~~
sayhello
No. Its emails from human beings. Perhaps I got bad nodes... but I had just
short of 10 slices if my memory serves me right

------
jread
Storm on Demand (by LiquidWeb) and GigeNet are pretty good. Storm starts at
$50/mo for dedicated CPU core and 2GB, GigeNet starts at $10/mo for 384MB and
shared CPU

------
jwr
I have been using Fivebean (<http://fivebean.com/>) and had a great experience
so far.

------
Niten
My vote is for ARP Networks.

<http://www.arpnetworks.com/>

They officially support FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well as various Linux
distributions, and since their VPSs are KVM rather than Xen-based you don't
have to worry about building or running a Xen kernel inside your VM. In my
experience they're very reliable.

------
gexla
Zerigo is another decent host. You can go with their hourly plan for 2 cents
per hour for a VPS with 256 MB of RAM.

------
empire29
I've had a Linode 360 since Jan 2010 and love it! rock solid performance,
create customer service and community.

~~~
AndrewLuecke
I used to use Linode, and I agree, it has a great community. But for the cost
of 1x Linode, I can purchase 2x Prgmr nodes

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daakus
I had a good experience with Prgmr for the most part (dirt cheap memory for
the price), and was reliable while I was using it. My only gripe was that IO
performance was terrible, to the point that using ls in bash was annoying.

I switched to Linode and have been very happy with it.

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Theo_w3b
We are using QuickWeb VPS, cheap yet excellent uptime and support. i'm running
my site with them for 6 months now and going great.

site is www.quickweb.co.nz/wht for promos packages! they have server at
softlayer so very stable network.

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j_h_o
I had a great experience with DynDNS VPS. Reliable and fast.

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jhawk28
I have had good experience with dreamhost: <http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-
vps.html>

~~~
bdickason
I've had a few small sites (sub-50k uniques) hosted on Dreamhost for the past
year. They go down. Alot. And the support is very slow to respond.

~~~
yellowbkpk
I've been a dreamhost customer since 2004 and receive near-instantaneous
support (my e-mails are responded to within 15 minutes). I don't host anything
mission critical there, but their shared hosting is pretty decent for a few
PHP + Ruby sites I serve up.

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oscardelben
Linode

