So I picked up a free VPS with these guys and it seemed pretty good. Currently, I'm using that one for monitoring other nodes. I decided to purchase their "small" package which I use it to keep my skype and msn online 24/7.
Specs - 10 GB HD 256 MB of RAM 1 CPU core 300 GB transfer Xen 1 IP address
Support - When I signed up for the free package, I didn't see a debian 6 32 bit template. I asked them to put one on there. Here's a screenshot with timestamps.
Their control panel
Benchmarks - I did them right now
Speed test (in California, linode speed test files) usingaria2c -i links -j 1Download Results: gid|stat|avg speed |path/URI ===+====+===========+=========================================================== 1| OK| 3.2MiB/s|/root/100MB-tokyo.bin 2| OK| 1.7MiB/s|/root/100MB-london.bin 3| OK| 3.9MiB/s|/root/100MB-newark.bin 4| OK| 4.9MiB/s|/root/100MB-atlanta.bin 5| OK| 12.5MiB/s|/root/100MB-dallas.bin 6| OK| 13.5MiB/s|/root/100MB-fremont.bin CPU model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 2393.998 openssl CPU speed test usingopenssl speed rsatiming function used: times sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 512 bits 0.000421s 0.000031s 2376.6 32420.2 rsa 1024 bits 0.001858s 0.000080s 538.2 12489.3 rsa 2048 bits 0.009785s 0.000241s 102.2 4153.9 rsa 4096 bits 0.058480s 0.000778s 17.1 1285.0 Disk speed test using dd usingdd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync; rm test16384+0 records in 16384+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 12.9452 s, 82.9 MB/s Disk test usingioping - ioping . -c 104096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=1 time=0.3 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=2 time=86.8 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=3 time=99.9 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=4 time=0.4 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=5 time=0.4 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=6 time=0.5 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=7 time=0.5 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=8 time=0.5 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=9 time=0.4 ms 4096 bytes from . (ext3 /dev/xvda1): request=10 time=0.3 ms --- . (ext3 /dev/xvda1) ioping statistics --- 10 requests completed in 9191.5 ms, 53 iops, 0.2 mb/s min/avg/max/mdev = 0.3/19.0/99.9/37.3 ms
One odd thing I noticed, my nodes have 252 MB of ram instead of 256 (I'll be opening a support ticket to see what's going on). Also they force 1 GB swap on mine so I have 9 GB HD space. I was going to wait a month before posting a review on this company since they're fairly new, but I'm I'll be busy next week so I decided to do this now. If you're worried about them disappearing, go with monthly payments.
tl;dr - support is extremely fast, good uptime and responsive node, fair I/O
Uploaded some pics for people with pitchforks - http://imgur.com/a/S6tvL