I was wondering what are the best alternatives to Amazon.<p>I use both Amazon (past 6 months) and openHosting (past 3 years). OpenHosting has been nice, with the occasional service disruption but really good technical support by people in the know. I am using their old infrastructure (vServer) but they have a new version out that looks cool (KVM). http://www.openhosting.com/cloud-hosting-features/hosting-demo/<p>What is your preference?
<a href="http://orionvm.com.au" rel="nofollow">http://orionvm.com.au</a> is cool, easy to use and stupidly fast. (Disks 60% faster then a raid 10 of 15K SAS disks, #1 in a whole suite of benchmarks <a href="http://orionvm.com.au/blog/3rd-Party-Performance-Benchmarks/" rel="nofollow">http://orionvm.com.au/blog/3rd-Party-Performance-Benchmarks/</a>)<p>Currently Australia only, although if you are in the US and find it interesting, email me.
Linode, if you don't need the cloud way of doing things (it is much harder to create your own image and use it on multiple servers, though doable it isn't the recommended way).<p>Things like stackscripts and on demand servers make it closer to the cloud style but not really. They are a good VPS provider with good support and reliability.
<a href="http://www.softlayer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.softlayer.com/</a> seems to be a good provider. Haven't used them as yet but will be making the switch from Amazon as soon as all of my instances are up.