So I was in the market for a VPS of late and started to poke about. I know with the economy turning to junk cheap hosting is ideal. I give you all this website: http://www.lowendbox.com/

Some pretty sweet deals if your looking for something small. No, I'm not affiliated with the website or any hosting providers listed there.

ayuri

Always be sure to read the comments of course. LEA knowingly posts providers that he doesn't like so that we can point out problems with their service. He leaves it up to visitor feedback.

I've tried a few cheap VPS providers in the past, and I've had trouble every time. Downtime, harddrive failures, poor performance because they stuff too many accounts into each box, bankruptcy, new management, poor customer service, just to name a few problems I've had to deal with. When an offer looks too good to be true, it usually is. What you save in money, you pay for in grief.

For the past three years I've used Linode. I don't even know if they have good customer service, because I've never had any reason to contact them. I don't notice they're there, because everything just works smoothly. They also have a library of howto articles, and a forum with very knowledgeable and helpful users. Plus they don't have stupid rules preventing you from running certain types of server processes. As long as you don't use the VPS for anything illegal they don't care what you do.

I'm purposely leaving out links so not to appear that I'm spamming.

Caius said:

When an offer looks too good to be true, it usually is. What you save in money, you pay for in grief.

Agreed. I actually run a hosting and consulting company but am required to host my sites offsite. My VPS provider is on the rather high end of those listed there but I have had little problem with them. (Like three server reboots within the last year and a dropped ticket that I had to bump up to management. I can live with that.)

You're not going to get a decent VPS when the provider is selling 2 gigs of memory for $7 a month. That's massively oversold and going to be nothing but trouble.

On the other side, we have (to be blunt) idiots who ignore the 900+ mostly negative comments for some providers, still rent from them, and then wonder why they're having issues with the provider.

Unfortunately I face this nearly every day when I explain to yet another soccer mom why their previous 3 buck a month shared hoster promoting their "unlimited" space and bandwidth is a bad idea compared with what we offering.

One of the reasons why i said to be sure to review the comments.

Yep, I agree with you all. I won't say what one I chose, but it was for a friend that needed something small but wasn't willing to pay a lot. I see it as: Fast, Good and Cheap. You get to pick two.

So far, we've been using it for just about three weeks and its been working well (gallery2 instal). Also, the other NICE thing about cheap hosting is you can use it as a vpn/proxie tunnel to get around content filters. Example the BBC iPlayer. Always handy :D And at three bucks a month, who cares?

ayuri

ayuri said:

Also, the other NICE thing about cheap hosting is you can use it as a vpn/proxie tunnel to get around content filters. Example the BBC iPlayer.

I use a ssh tunnel through my VPS to watch stuff that is restricted from my country (due to copyright reasons) all the time. Haha. PuTTY is very flexible

Caius said:


I use a ssh tunnel through my VPS to watch stuff that is restricted from my country (due to copyright reasons) all the time. Haha. PuTTY is very flexible

Lucky you. I set up my tunnel only to find out that a lot of sites block traffic from Germany due to abuse.

Oh well.