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that crap exists. It's not cloud. You're looking for Slicehost. They have a webconsole you can use to log in, disable networking, re-enable networking, the whole bit.

I don't get why people think that "cloud" merely means "hosted VM" when, in fact, it means nothing of the sort. If system 148 of a cluster of 250 stops responding, your cloud shouldn't notice or care; it should die automatically, and get replaced automatically. If you're beholden to the health of a particular system, then it's not Cloud Computing. If you can't control and access the resources with simple REST, then it's not cloud. If it's a glass of water, it's not a cloud.

I have a VPS at Gandi.net and it's a thousand times better than being hosted by a company that controls your web site. Gandi is the best according to me (for just one reason: I can prepay and they do not store my credit card number) but I've also heard good things about Slicehost, prgmr, and Linode.

A while back I was looking at Slicehost and Linode. I ended up picking Linode since you get significantly more memory and disk space. Right now I'm paying $20/month for their first plan (16 GB of disk space, 360 MB of memory, 200 GB transfer). For the same price, Slicehost gives you 256 MB of memory, 10 GB disk space, and 150 GB of bandwidth). Slicehost does seem to scale up farther (just in case you want 16 GB of memory), but buying your own server and paying for colo is probably cheaper at that point ($800/month).

Anyway, I haven't had any problems with Linode, and it's faster than Bluehost. In my quick test, Bluehost's ping was 60-80 ms, while Linode's was 30-35 ms. I uploaded a file to Linode at 9.5 MB/s (using scp from a school computer), and download that file back to the school computer at 4.5 MB/s. I uploaded a file to Bluehost using ncftp at 2 MB/s and then downloaded with wget at 480 KB/s.

The only downside to Linode is that you have to configure everything yourself, but so far I haven't had to change anything except my Apache configs since I installed Arch on it a year ago (with regular updates). I like the extra control, but it is extra work.

1. If you're looking for a shared web host solution (maybe under 50-100k unique hits a month), you can't go wrong with http://www.asmallorange.com/ . I used their "small" shared hosting package for several years and never had a problem.

2. If you're looking for a VPS with quite a bit more available resources than a web host solution and you like to setup your own *nix box, you'd be good with http://www.linode.com/ http://www.slicehost.com/ (those two primarily support Linux, but you can setup a NetBSD Xen slice by hand if you are so inclined), or if you really don't want any brakes when it comes to setting up your Xen VPS, http://www.prgmr.com/ (they also primarily support Linux, but they have a HOWTO on their wiki on how to setup NetBSD.)

3. I haven't found a good unmanaged dedicated host yet, though I hear http://www.softlayer.com/ is great. If you want a managed dedicated host, you can't go wrong with http://www.rackspace.com/ .

I just got a Linode account and I like the service a lot. I also use Slicehost for several small sites, which is almost identical in terms of service offernings (although a little more expensive bang-for-the-buck-wise), but reliable, and you get snapshot backups for $5 extra/month.

I'm more of a fan of languages like Ruby than I am Java, but if you really want to run Tomcat, it might not be a bad idea to move to a VPS like Slicehost and install it yourself. You'll get much better performance than any shared host too.

When you say 'old' it depends what you want to run on them.
As a developer I use a whole range of systems, and I don't throw old machines away, I use them for testing.

• My main desktop is a Quad core AMD Phenom with 8G of memory
• Sitting next to that are two AMD Athlon machines, each with 4G of memory

I also have

• Four Pentium III machines with 512M of memory
• Two AMD K6 machines with 256M of memory
• Four Pentium I (yes one) machines with 64M of memory

A Pentium III machine with 512M of memory is quite capable of running a fairly complex website. I use them to test websites developed using the Drupal content management system. If your website won't load and run in 512M of memory - you are probably doing something wrong.

In the past I have used Xen VMs, but at the time I found it tricky to setup (from what I have seen it has improved a lot since then, so this may be a better option now). For setting up a simple test system, it worked out easier to fire up one of the old machines and run the tests on that.
If I need to setup a test system that other members of our team can access, I use rented VMs from one of the cloud providers, FlexiScale, SliceHost or Amazon EC2.

One thing I would recommend is that you never configure a machine by hand. Everything should be automatic, using shell scripts or equivalent to setup the machines. Everything, including the scripts for installing packages and configuring the system should be in source control.

To setup a new set of tests, I start by writing a shell script that will install and configure all the components needed to run the tests. It will take a while to create the first few scripts, but you will gradually build up a library of functions that you can re-use. Someone else has already mentioned using Puppet and Cobbler to achieve the same thing. Unfortunately they weren't around when I started doing this. I haven't used either of them yet, but I hope to experiment with them fairly soon.

Whichever system you use, automating the install and configuration will save you a huge amount of time in the long run. Using my library of configuration scripts, I can setup and configure a new test system in a matter of minutes. The configuration scripts are designed to be portable, so I can use the same tools on one of my local test machines, or on an external VM hosted by a cloud provider.

As to what I use the Pentium I machines for - stress testing. I write Java web services for a UK eScience project, processing large (Tbyte) data sets. One of the things I need to check is the webservice should never try to load the entire dataset into memory. It should process the data bit at a time, and free up resources as soon as it has finished with them. As a stress test, I deploy a webservice on one of the tiny 64M machines, and then run multiple clients on the bigger more capable machines to hammer it into the ground, repeatedly, day after day for a week. If my webservice can process Gbyte data sets on a Pentium I machine that only has 64M of memory - without grinding to a halt. Then I can be fairly confident that when the same webservice is deployed on a multi core machine with Gbytes of memory it will probably be able to cope with the kind of load our scientists intend to throw at it.

Summary : Keep the old machines and learn how to setup, configure and use them as test machines. In the process you will encounter many of the problems that your developers and sys admins have to cope with on a daily basis, and you will be much better placed to be able t

Slicehost.com is the best of both worlds, old school standard (dedicated) hosting model, but since the "servers" are VMs they can scale in performance capabilities on command, literally, Slicehost has an API to increase the cpu and memory available to the "server"

So, when you have excess load, you increase the size of your VM, or you clone it and run 2, or 4 etc. paying only for what you use -- when you use it

Slicehost, the preferred Linux VPS host of web 2.0 developers everywhere, has an published API that you can use to access their DNS hosting and make whatever changes you need.

Slicehost, the preferred Linux VPS host of web 2.0 developers everywhere, has an published API that you can use to access their DNS hosting and make whatever changes you need.

I hate plugging companies in a forum, but Slicehost maintains a repository of articles covering the configuration of CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Apache, nginx, MySQL, etc. They give you great step-by-step information on the installation and basic configuration of a server.

It's free and open to whoever wants to read. http://articles.slicehost.com/

I assume you're using shared hosting. It's a cheap and easy option, but you give up all control of who is on your server, and what they are doing.
I primarily use VPSes for many reasons including this one. It's a great middle ground between colo and shared hosting, where the host is in charge of giving me hardware and network support, and that is all.
There are many good VPS providers out there. I personally prefer XEN based hosts to OS level virt like OpenVZ that powers most of the market.
http://vpslink.com/xen-vps/ and http://slicehost.com/ are some of the better services I've used, but there's plenty more out there.

I am primarily a user of Microsoft products, which I enjoy using very much. Things like Visual Studio, the .NET framework, PowerShell and their server products are excellent, regardless of the infantile FUD and lame jokes people here on Slashdot (and most everywhere) seem to like so much.

I'm also a user and supporter of open source and free software (whatever incarnation those take in a particular piece of software). I spend large amounts of time writing Python code in Vim, and deploying it to my Slice to run in Apache and Postgresql. My primary browser is Firefox. I donate quarterly to the charity supported by the Vim project, I donated to the Mozilla foundation before they started raking up the millions, and I've given probably upwards of $1,000 in the past two years through the SourceForge donation system to projects like CDex, WinMerge, FileZilla, InkScape and others.

I believe FOSS is pretty much the only thing that will manage to keep Microsoft on their toes. Firefox did a fantastic job of proving that you can whip Microsoft out of their self-imposed stagnation, which results in competition and better software for everyone, regardless of whether the source is available or not, and whether or not I have to pay for it.

A derogatory epithet for the enemy binds the community together against a common foe. It is not childish, though it is militant. To use someone's own chosen name is to honour them. Micro$hit do not deserve that honour.

But people like you (and twitter, who started this thread with one of his 12 sockpuppets) are probably what is holding back FOSS the most. You, and your proclivity to flood the internet with your foolish conspiracy theories, badly-masked hatred and creative spelling. You, the armchair advocates and Monday morning advocates who have probably never written a single line of code in their lives, never submitted a bug, never updated a documentation wiki, never donated to a project and in general never did anything worthwhile because you're too busy screaming and demanding that everyone should hate Microsoft with the same zeal as you do.

If you are advocating the destruction of Microsoft, I'm sorry but that makes you my enemy. Not because I'm in love with them, but because I don't buy that "choice" you are pushing on people. And unfortunately that attitude comes from the top, from the FSF's FUD campaigns to Stallman's stupid edicts and pulpit flames. They also happen to think creative spelling is clever, and seem to use it to try to get their point across at any opportunity.

I admire people like Bram Molenaar, Guido van Rossum and thousands of others - seen and unseen - who are out there heads down writing code and contributing to FOSS every day. People who don't demean themselves or the people who look to them by engaging in activities that are nothing more than a puerile religious crusade.

It is interesting that you mention the "community". It has always seemed to me that the "community" exists only when the point is to hate a corporation. The rest of the time it looks like a bunch of bickering groups that hardly get along with each other because their leaders have decreed that some software license is incompatible with another. That's probably where the term "open sores" comes from. And you don't mind people calling it "open sores", right?

$12/year ouch, give http://www.omnis.com/ a try. They charge $7.95 for QTY 1-49 and give price discounts after that.

Combine that with with VPS hosting from http://www.slicehost.com/ where you can get VPS slices starting at $20/month.

Fuck Godaddy and the likes, there are other (good) alternatives out there you just have too look.

Oh and while I am at it, don't use Dotster either! Unreliable service, horribly SLOW shared SSL server ..... just plain sucks.

I have been using http://www.omnis.com/ to register all my domains for the past years.
I have tried GoDaddy (horrible website), Dotster and a few others but none are as cheap and good as Omnis. Omnis even offers support on weekends, give them a try ..... as far as hosting, I signed up with http://www.slicehost.com/ a few months ago and love it.

As far as Network Solutions goes, shame on you!

Companies like Slicehost use Xen to power their VPS servers. As a user, I have never had trouble with these servers (yet), and I suspect their user base runs at least into the hundreds, so maybe it isn't as difficult as you state.

I have a VPS ("slice") at Slichehost and it's the best thing since... well, you know.

Seriously, it may not be right for all applications, and things like Solaris' zones/containers are quite awesome (much more control over IO, fair share scheduling, etc.), I have one of those too at Joyent, but (like many things Linux) it seems to work, be fast, and get the job done at a great value.

I have seen people complain when they have an app that's IO bound and there's another slice with heavy IO needs--looks like IO contention isn't really managed by the hypervisor--but that's pretty rare.

Besides performance at a great price, you also get the benefits dmayle talks about: easy deployment (you get a choice of prebuilt distros to install), and backups/spanshots (both create and restore) are as easy as clicking a button in the control panel. You can also upsize or downsize your slice from the control panel, and be back online in minutes. Try that with a dedicated server!

If you're looking to spend less, virtual private servers are the way to go. I've used two hosts and have been pretty impressed with both.

Slicehost will give you a virtual box (root access, choice of distro) with decent specs for about $20/month.
TekTonic.net (whom I found through www.unixshell.com) gives you an unmanaged virtual host for $15/month.

Again, I've used both and have been very happy with the services. Bandwidth hasn't been an issue, uptime and performance have been great.

For a VPS I suggest Slicehost. Xen for 20$/month. AJAX-ified management of your account, console access, DNS, great choice of distributions.

Also a great community on the forums and chat.

I'm a satisfied Slicehost customer. Their hosting is Xen based, screaming fast, and more affordable than anything else I've seen. They don't do any hand holding, but if you know what you're doing they get out of your way.