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Ask Slashdot: Best Inexpensive VPS Provider?
David Greene writes "After many years of waiting for my provider to upgrade DSL service from the measly 1.5 Mbps I have now, I've decided to go another route. Unfortunately, no other provider in the area (Twin Cities) offers static IPs and permission to run servers. I am looking for a VPS solution to host the public parts of my personal site. What can the Slashdot community recommend as a good, inexpensive VPS provider for personal use? This will mainly be hosting a blog and a couple of Free Software projects (wikis, git repositories, etc.). I would prefer something with KVM so I can manage my own OS install but I am open to other options. Root shell access is essential."
Recently I discovered that a low cost (semi well known) Shared host I use actually stores passwords (ie login to portal, sql, etc) in a form which can be easily converted to clear text... hell, they even have multiple Show Password links and require you to share said password with them to receive tech support... so they can verify it against the clear text password they see.
I've since been on the hunt for a new host... however have discovered that the treatment of passwords in this manor is not uncommon. Hell, last night I canceled a VPS account less than an hour after signing up as I discovered that not only does the admin exhibit editorial control over passwords (he changed my initial one), but that he too stores them in clear text.
Granted... if you are smart you will use a different password per account/service... however when such a company treats accounts in such a way I can do nothing but run.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I guess you don't use them for outbound email since FDC Servers has a terrible reputation for hosting spammers and having a completely non-responsive abuse department. There are more than a few members of anti-spam lists that advocate a block on sight policy for SMTP as far as FDC are concerned, and I know some that kill them for web as well due to hosted malware.
Of course, that may or may not be an issue for a given individual since it depends on what you want the server for, but I'd strongly recommend a few search queries for "$provider" in connection with "abuse", "spam" and "malware", etc. If they have an entry on Spamhaus, or lots of IPs listed in DNSBLs or URIBLs, then that's generally a bad sign too.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I can't believe nobody has mentioned http://webkeepers.com/. You can get in for as little as $6.95 a month, and for $19.95 a month you get an unmatched 250GB of disk and 1GB of guaranteed RAM. They have been excellent for me.
Slicehost doesn't exist anymore; Rackspace bought them, let the service languish without improvements (while competitors continued to improve), and then killed it off by forcing customers to migrate to Rackspace's way more expensive services.
My understanding is that many Slicehost customers migrated to Linode, since it was always the closest competitor anyhow.