This site is hosted on a Linode 768 VPS, and has been for a couple of years now, along with some other domains. I have hosted it at home, and also on a GoDaddy VPS which didn’t end up being all that good, but am now very happy with Linode. I host a combination of PHP (mostly WordPress) and Ruby on Rails applications.

Over the years Linode has kept the price the same ($30/month for my plan) but have increased the disk and memory of their plans every year. When I started out my plan had 18G of disk space and around 512MB of RAM, now it has 30G of disk and 768MB of RAM. So the value for money keeps on getting better.

I’ve also set up Linode VPSes for a few people, including TwiTip.com and TopMMANews.com and continue to assist in their management. Both of them are fairly heavy sites and also run on a Linode 768. TwiTip hit 11mbps of traffic when it was tweeted by Ashton Kutcher, and TopMMANews has a fairly active site.

I’ve found the service to be very reliable. At one point one of their data centres was having problems but they were fixed reasonably quickly and the company kept the customers updated.

You get a control panel that lets you see your cpu/disk/io status, along with how much disk and network you’ve used. The screenshot below shows my system (you can see that I haven’t yet taken advantage of the 6GB of disk space they added to my account)

One feature I really like about the service is that you get free DNS hosting, and the interface is very simple (I mean “simple” as “does not get in your way”, not as in “stripped of features”). You can do AAAA, TXT, and SRV records, or control the whole thing through an API.

I can’t speak highly enough about Linode VPSes. If you’re looking for a VPS service they offer great value for money and a high service level. If you’re wondering about which size to buy, I’ve found the 768 to be a real workhorse. You can also upgrade/downgrade your plan with minimal downtime and no loss of data, so there’s little risk in picking the wrong plan.