Ask HN: What provider do you use for Cloud hosting and why?

Linode x1000.<p>I actually have a VPS at both linode and slicehost (originally this was so that I could have a "dev" and "prod" server for my projects. A stupid decision [because it's expensive and my projects don't get much traffic], but an educational one) and the linode one (at least according to ab) outperforms the slicehost.<p>If you're thinking about getting a VPS, do it immediately. The $20/mo I started spending (now $40) a couple of years ago was probably one of the most important things I've ever done towards furthering my education.

These days I think that's like asking what hosting provider you use and why. There are so many out there which have some sort of cloud elements these days. If going the dedicated server route, Softlayer is among the best. If going VPS, then Rackspace / Slicehost can give you great flexibility with pricing options (and some of the cheapest VPS options if you have low traffic.) EC2 is among the best if you need a well developed swiss army knife / kitchen sink API and wide assortment of services to work with. Heroku is among the best if you work with Ruby and don't want to be bothered with system administration (Lot's of others rising up in this space, and GAE for Python / Java.) Joyent is great if you would rather work in Solaris rather than Linux.<p>Edit: Forgot to mention Azure for the MS world, though EC2 also offers Windows servers. I should have known to mention Linode since that service is so popular with the HN community. Though the Rackspace options provide more cloud services last I checked.

Amazon. We have very large data transfer requirements<i></i>* plus CloudFront is the cheapest CDN out there as far as I know.<p><i></i>*Spent weeks trying to explain to a large school district's "caching expert" (100,000+ students all going through a $30,000 dedicated caching server) that they do not need to flush the cache every day. He was not convinced. Oy.

Slicehost has definitely plunged into irrelevance, as many predicted after the Rackspace buyout (and Slicehost vehemently denied would happen). I use VPSFarm as well; for $21 per month I get 1 GB RAM and a lot more transfer included. It's been pretty reliable so far; a little downtime but nothing out of the ordinary.

I have accounts with both Rackspace and Heroku, and Heroku's free account sustained almost 60k hits over the last three days for me like a champ. When I got on LifeHacker, I turned on a dyno because I thought I'd need it, but then I shut it off because it didn't even matter.

Heroku has been great for bootstrapping. I fear though that it's only a matter of time before Salesforce pulls a Chargify like stunt.

Amazon.<p>- Amazon EC2 instances for web servers<p>- Amazon Elastic Load Balancers in front of the web servers, also handling SSL termination<p>- Amazon RDS for MySQL databases on the back end, with automatic failover to a hot spare and zero-downtime full database backups<p>I reserve EC2 and RDS instances on an annual basis, otherwise the expense would outweigh the benefits for me.<p>For offsite backups, I run a TonidoPlug in my house. Under a buck a month in electricity usage, runs Ubuntu linux, cron runs the backup scripts each night.

For home:<p>- Linode. Got the 1024 for $40/month. I'm pretty happy it fits my usage. Host my home websites, email, vpn, etc.<p>For work:<p>Our customers are mostly in New Zealand so it's a real pain. US based providers are cheap but slow to access while NZ providers are expensive (especially for international traffic) and there is a lot less choice. We are finishing rolling out a new GSLB provider ( 3crowd, recommend ) so we can effectively deal with them separately.<p>Having said that we use the following mainly to serve international customers and NZ overflow:<p>- Singlehop - Nice, cheap dedicated servers, new servers are deployed in ~3 hours and fairly reliable. Nice user interface and good spec for the price.<p>- Serverloft - Not quite as good but still pretty cheap. Deployment was slower last time but no real problems.<p>- Amazon Cloudfront - Playing around with it. Bandwidth is too expensive for day-to-day usage but great for overflows. NZ customers hit California or Singapore so a bit slow although there are rumours of an Australian site coming at some point.<p>I'm tempted to move the prod/dev environment to a US-based cloud but the latency/bandwidth constants from NZ-&#62;US means that files uploads/downloads for devs and internal customer's are probably too slow.

Aside from Amazon there aren't any true cloud providers.<p>Rackspace, VPS.NET, Linode et al are all just VPS++marketing (_not_ cloud).

There are some distinguishing factors between IaaS clouds and VPS: paygo pricing (VM &#38; bandwidth), API, self-service automated provisioning, no term commitments, scale-up/down (CPU, memory), VM imaging/cloning/templating, off instance storage. Some VPS providers like Linode, Slicehost, RimuHosting, etc. do offer a few cloud like features, but I wouldn't put them on the same playing field as EC2. If you don't need the additional flexibility and features of cloud, Linode is an excellent VPS provider.<p>There is also a big difference between PaaS cloud services like AppEngine, Azure and Heroku which require your application to fit within a particular mold (programming language, packaging, deployment), and IaaS cloud providers which offer you the full flexibility of root access to a dedicated server.

newservers.com - "dedicated cloud" - the servers are physical servers but they have a provisioning api. they have the cheapest 48GB boxes we can find, and we're running an app where we need a few very high memory boxes<p>pros - boxes are cheap relative to EC2, boxes are fast as they're all yours cons - they're slow to provision; up to an hour when you make a request, but the smaller boxes are faster - 10 mins or so. also, only one datacenter, and it's in miami...

Linode 512<p>1. Awesome support.<p>2. I got a free voucher, so I essentially have a free server for 5 months. I'm actually considering just paying them anyway.<p>3. Linode Library is amazing for a Linux noob such as myself - <a href="http://library.linode.com/" rel="nofollow">http://library.linode.com/</a> - Had an OpenVPN server setup and going within an hour. It's a great way to learn Linux, etc<p>4. Freedom of use - no restrictions on what you use the server for as long as it isn't illegal.

Moved from Amazon to Softlayer because we could get a mix of virtual and dedicated infrastructure at a good price. Amazon wasn't cutting it for the low-latency part of our system. SL hasn't been perfect, but pretty good -- maybe slightly better than Amazon for reliability.

Windows Azure<p>Since we run on .Net and SQL Server it felt like the right choice. Microsoft has some really nice C# libraries that make accessing things like Blobs, Table Storage and Queues dead simple.

- 14 webapps on AppEngine, all small and all profitable<p>- 1 Linode for internal webapps<p>- 1 Linode for some fancy data mining<p>- S3 for backups<p>I highly recommend all those services if you undestand their strengths.

Have hosted with RimuHosting (years), Slicehost (1 year) and VPS.NET (2 weeks).<p>Slicehost VPS's by far had the worst real-world performance for me. After a year and multiple Slashdot or Digg front page stories taking down the site. I found that I had to scale to approximately 2x of what I thought I would need in order for the site to stay up.<p><i></i> More specifically, I had to scale to twice what other services were able to keep my site up on. So if I could get by on a 4GB instance on Rimu, AWS or Linode, that meant on Slicehost I needed somewhere between a 6GB and 8GB instance. Multiple times I found for my site to be responsive (Apache + PHP FCGID) I was always buying bigger instances on Slicehost than anywhere else. The disk I/O was one of the biggest problems.<p>To keep the site stable on Slicehost and support the traffic I ended up spending twice what I budgeted for, for a few months before giving up.<p>VPS.NET is really cool conceptually (I think it's like Heroku with the 'cells' of power you apply to your server) but I kept getting VPS failures. 3 times in 1 week and support would take increasingly longer and longer to bring the server back up. When you make your living from writing and publishing, have your site just be <i>dead</i> for an entire day is painful.<p>RimuHosting has been my favorite by far. I eventually went to a dedicated with them, but they are a quiet group of smart new zealanders with an ugly-ass website but excellent hardware and service. I don't have down-time with them and their overages for bandwidth is cheaper than AWS from Colo4Dallas -- $0.10/GB or less. They really should advertise that, BW is a killer for some folks (like me).<p>All that being said, if you like a nicer website and the real-time scaling functionality that Slicehost or Linode provide, I've heard lots of good things about Linode (and many comments here seem to verify that) so they seem like a safe bet.<p>Some quick-reference numbers looking at AWS versus RimuHosting are below... I had these handy when I update my comparisons every few months just to see what is out there. Thought someone might find them interesting.<p>AWS Bandwidth per Year - $0.15/GB<p>----------------<p>1,000 * 0.15 * 12 = $1800<p>AWS RESERVED INSTANCES per Year<p>----------------<p>Small<p>227.50 + (0.03 * 24 * 365) = 490.30 + 1800 = $2290.30<p>Large (Most Comparable to Dedicated Below)<p>910 + (0.12 * 24 * 365) = 1961.20 + 1800 = $3761.20<p>XLarge<p>1820 + (0.24 * 24 * 365) = 3922.40 + 1800 = $5722.40<p>RimuHosting Dedicated per Year<p>----------------<p>4-core HT-enabled/12GB Dedicated/1TB Bandwidth<p>306 * 12 = $3672<p>REFERENCES<p>1. <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/</a><p>2. <a href="http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp?hom=t-ded" rel="nofollow">http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp?hom=t-ded</a>

I use VPS.net. My project isn't in production yet, but I have a few clients on it. Love the flexibly and features.

Just so you all know, sites like Linode and Slicehost are NOT cloud hosting but actually VPS hosting

I'm using AppEgine and love what it does for me, it's also free to start.

Anyone know of any non-US based cloud services with reasonable capacity?