Poll: Which hosting provider do you use?

I have a Dell Poweredge 2U in my basement that I have been playing with lately. I replaced the 15k SAS drives with regular ol SATA drives the other day and wanted to see how they fared against some of the VPS's out there. (Reason: Twin 73gb drives, while they might be pretty quick, doesn't leave a lot of room for a home lab type setup where I want to run a lot of different VMs)

The command used for this was:

    hdparm -Tt /device

Not even sure if this is a really great way to benchmark drives, but here are the results:

Digital Ocean where my drive was /dev/vda:

     Timing cached reads:   17246 MB in  2.00 seconds = 8632.56 MB/sec
     Timing buffered disk reads: 892 MB in  3.00 seconds = 297.20 MB/sec 

Next was Linode where my drive was /dev/xvda:

     Timing cached reads:   12680 MB in  1.99 seconds = 6381.79 MB/sec
     Timing buffered disk reads: 614 MB in  3.00 seconds = 204.66 MB/sec

Was expecting a more dramatic difference considering DO uses SSD's and Linode does not (I am not in the SSD beta). When you compare consumer grade HD's and SSD's the difference is night and day.

I do not have results from my Poweredge because it's currently powered off. The fucking thing sounds like a C5 doing an assault landing on a tattered runway during a hail storm.

Take this all with a grain of salt just sharing since we're comparing hosts here.

Finally, I love Linode and have never had any shit with them. Digital Ocean is also great although I have only really dipped my toes into their stuff. Have not tried their recently launched internal-networking yet. Also, unfortunately you cannot (easily) downsize a box, only expand one. Rather you need to create a backup and then a new box and restore the backup to that new box or something. Seems silly. Linode lets me do this, and I do it for some ghetto on-demand scaling from time to time.

Sidenote: If you wanna muck around with FreeBSD I had some good experience with doing that on Rackspace. Doing it on EC2 is not as rewarding.

I use Linode and Rackspace for VPS's and Dreamhost and Bluehost for web sites.

Dreamhost has gone downhill over the years in a variety of ways. Customer support, server response etc.

Bluehost I use very lightly but it has been fine.

Rackspace? Well, here's one of my Nagios logs from 24 minutes ago

[2013-10-15 17:00:11] HOST ALERT: mondragon.whatsanovel.com;DOWN;SOFT;1;PING CRITICAL - Packet loss = 83%, RTA = 5656.74 ms

Yesterday it conked out nine times, to recover within ten seconds. I have to say I heard about this sort of thing before signing up.

Linode has been fantastic. Great uptimes, free additions of bandwidth, disk space and so forth.

Others have mentioned Ramnode here. That's a service I might consider if I was expanding. One reason I never signed up is last time around their new slots were full. Some services sell when they're overloaded, but they don't - why is why they're popular I guess. I may get a VPS there in the next few months and try them out.

Can't say enough about ASmallOrange's service. Independent company, green, prompt responses, never had a problem. They've even led me by the hand to fix a couple issues I overlooked. I've switched many of my customers to them over the years. As shared hosts go, I haven't had a better experience.

http://chunkhost.com recently bumped up their plans and lowered their prices. $9/month gets you a gig of ram on a 30 gig SSD, and I'm only paying $6.75/month with a discount they gave me as a beta member.

I've been incredibly happy with them.

hostmonster.com has been very good for me.

-bowerbird