Thanks to all of the helpful comments people left in response to my last post about hosting. I got some really helpful hints from them — including the one I eventually followed, to VPSLink.

I wound up going with VPSLink. Their prices are amazing and the performance is good, too.

I have to admit — I shot myself in the foot not once, not twice, but three times. The shorewall config I was using on my old VPS (which was hosted under UML) apparently doesn’t work well under OpenVZ (used at VPSLink). By “doesn’t work well”, I mean “blocks all traffic to or from the host on startup”.

So, I had rsynced over everything from my old host to the new, and rebooted the new. But it didn’t come back up. I was pretty sure this was why. I dropped off a ticket to the VPSLink folks asking them to please rm /etc/init.d/shorewall for me.

60 minutes later, they had done it. (And it looks like a bug in their ticket system prevented it from being flagged as “emergency” — they said they would have done it faster otherwise.)

I then tried to fix shorewall, and it looked like it was working, so I put the init script back and rebooted. Same problem! They fixed it again in about 60 minutes. (The ticket still had normal priority)

Finally, I deleted shorewall entirely, then rsynced my old host to the new one. Things looked good, so I rebooted…. and yes, guess what, that rsync brought back shorewall so it got hosed YET AGAIN. ARGH. This was now well into the overnight hours, but they still helped me out.

All in all, I am so far VERY impressed with VPSLink. I heartily recommend them. I’ll be sure to post updates as time goes by.

Regarding Memset, my current provider: Really great company. I heartily recommend them, too. My needs for RAM just wouldn’t be ecnomical under their current plans, but they are usually competitive. I also have experience with JohnCompanies. I used them way back when they only did FreeBSD VPSs, on through the Linux days, and we currently use their services at work. These are also great folks and I would recommend them to anyone. Like Mako’s suggestion of Rimuhost, both memset and JohnCompanies are “quality first” providers — not necessarily cheapest, but their systems work as advertised and are almost never down, and they support you with experienced Unix admins. BTW, Memset’s current plans use Xen and JohnCompanies uses Virtuozzo.