Ask HN: Best VPS providers for fast scale-out

Performance: - PhoenixNap SecuredCloud <a href="http://www.phoenixnap.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.phoenixnap.com/</a> (US-West, US-East, Amsterdam) [VMWare based, spinup time is about 45 seconds, offers every imaginable feature for large production environments, enterprise firewall, f5 load balancing, 100% uptime SLA]<p>Value: - Digital Ocean <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/</a> (US-East, Amsterdam) [KVM/QEMU based, spinup time is under a minute, decent 'basic' API]<p>As a current customer of both companies, we use Digital Ocean to host our company VPN and development nodes, and PhoenixNAP to host our production sites. (Bandwidth at PhoenixNAP is billed @.05- per gb, very competitive compared to EC2 especially considering they use exclusively premium bandwidth)

Friend of doppenhe here.<p>Amazon, heroku etc aren't fast enough for us due to spin-up time. Basically when we get a particular command from a user, we need to do a LOT computation on many parallel machines, but for a short burst of time.<p>Keeping a whole cluster of machines reserved would be prohibitively expensive at this stage. We would prefer to keep a small base-load capacity reserved, and then spin up a large number of instance for a short time. Response time is key here.<p>It would be best if they were already up and running, waiting for a command, but idle most of the time. Fine if it's shared with others. Kind of like a computation insurance for short bursts of high-demand.<p>Anyone know any services like that?

I recommend you take this question over to the WebHostingTalk forums [1]. They have a lot of smart people who are in that space and can offer a lot of insights as well as deals on hardware, bandwidth, storage, etc. I am not affiliated, just a user there from time to time.<p>[1] - <a href="http://webhostingtalk.com" rel="nofollow">http://webhostingtalk.com</a>

Linode is good with nice API , Even Digital Ocean is good with basic API.<p>We are using DO ( value for money ) for a new service and A full nginx based site can be setup in under 60 - 80 seconds after cloning a basic image. New instances take a little less time.

Heroku can spin up new instances in seconds and you can automate it with HireFireApp. It's not a VPS, but a VPS aka shared hardware is never going to be "seconds" unless it's already provisioned and basically just needs to boot (EC2 and your own AMIs?).