For the past one year, I have not done much development on my linode machine. When in Pakistan I needed to have a machine which could act as my IRC client as well as my blog engine, email server and a back up drop box. I have been using Linode for over a year now and I am pretty happy with their service. But the problem is that I am under utilizing this service. I can probably get a cheaper or even free service to do all my hosting.
My base line would be some thing which would cost me less than 0.027 US$ per hour. Amazons elastic cloud services might be the way to go as I would like to play around with those services. Renting a dedicated server is probably out of my reach at the moment and will not be needed for my minimal footprint activities. However there are certain benifits of using a mid size provider such as linode (a hint would be that big provider’s IP segments are some times blocked by digital TV aggragators….enough said).
The reasons for moving away from linode would be mere change. I have not been keeping up with server technology for some time now and I don’t necessarily get a chance to play with new things at work. I might as well just try out Amazon AWS for a month and just check it out if its even viable and if it’s not, I always have a realiable VPS to come back to. In any case I would stroing recommend Linode to any one looking for a VPS.
Edit: I have looked up the cost of using Amazon AWS cloud, it costs almost double for the smallest instances, but at the same time offers double the power in terms of memory. After looking into my schedule I have decided to not tinker with my current setup till the next LTS of ubuntu comes out, after which I plan to stick with a production server for the whole lenght of LTS and it also turns out that by the time next LTS comes out I would need to update my system any way.
(30th Dec)Edit: I have piad one more month of dues to Linode. I am on the lookout for a better VPS. If my finances permit I would prefer to go for cloud system (or atleast a bigger VPS for my Java needs).
