Last night I read Linode‘s announcement that they have opened a new data centre in London, and jumped at the opportunity. I’ve been using Linode since January this year, and their VPS hosting has been absolutely trouble-free. Not only that, they have probably the best administration interface I have ever seen. It’s easy to use, clearly labelled and very well laid out.
In addition they have given me probably the best customer service satisfaction of any company I have ever used. Their ticket response time for me has been consistently under 4 minutes, which is hugely impressive. I’m not the only one who is praising them, they’ve received good praise all over Twitter, with response times of 4-6 minutes.
I highly recommend using Linode if you’re thinking of getting a VPS – and if you do decide to sign up, please use my referral link! 
Or my code: 939c7865b8818f015533efae7b06cdb06f9b59be
And as a side note, as my IP has changed, it will take another 24 hours or so for the DNS to propogate probably, so hold fast until then everyone!
A little while ago I posted about Slicehost, who provide Virtual Private Servers (VPS) in USA for pretty good VFM. My SVN repository and muck-around LAMP environment has been hosted on my laptop for a few weeks now, but Hannah wants the laptop back so I did some investigation into getting a VPS. I’ve settled on Linode, who are similar but I think are better VFM. Admittedly, most of my basis was on David Welton’s article, but also partially on my personal preference. I decided that Linode has better value for money on face value, and I quite like their user interface, and you can see videos and screenshots of it before you decide to buy it. I only have the lowest-tier – the Linode 360, hosted in Newark, and it costs me a mere $19.95 a month, which is great for me.
If you fancy buying a VPS through Linode, then please use my referral code which will credit my account with $20 (a free month basically!). Click here to sign up using my referral code, or when you fill out the registration form, copy and paste this code:
939c7865b8818f015533efae7b06cdb06f9b59be
Opening up Google Reader this morning, I found this post on PHPDeveloper.org‘s RSS feed. They use Xen hypervisor on their big beefy servers to provide what they call “slices” (i.e. virtual machines that you can do pretty much whatever you want with).
The host is called Slicehost, and the provide VMs of 256mb RAM up to 15.5GB RAM (!). Prices for the smallest “slice” is $20 (£13.37) per month, which is pretty reasonable for the muck-around equivalent of your own dedicated server. The beauty of it is that the resources you pay for are reserved, so you won’t find some other “slice” on the same server as you using up your RAM or CPU time when you need it the most. Of course, these VMs aren’t just limited to development servers, upwards from the 1GB slice is the equivalent of your own dedicated server, so is also more than suited to production servers, especially as initially Slicehost was meant for business and production needs. Bandwidth is pretty reasonable as well – 100GB per month for the base package. Personally I wish something like this had come along before I bought 1and1 hosting for 2 years, heh! Oh well.
Check out Slicehost here!
I’ve finally managed to get the last remaining websites I used to run on my home servers up and running. Hannah and Tom’s blog are now online and raring to go…
Check them out!
Yep – we’re live and kicking again! Asgrim.com now works, well ahead of schedule, so top marks to 1and1.co.uk so far!
Now all I need is internet at home… gah!
