It's not trendy, but I still love dedicated servers. You must invest time as a sysadmin (or hire a good freelance), but then you can cram so much more power per system...

Or choose a Paas if you really don't want to get dirty with the low-level infrastucture details.

Rackspace Cloud or AWS are your most equivalent options. There are lots of cloud VPS providers, but it's difficult to tell if they have any better security practices. I'd venture to guess that most small VPS providers aren't really any more secure; they're just smaller targets.

I think this is the essential point, the smaller ones often have no data points either way regarding security. That said, there are some great cheap ones http://www.lowendbox.com/

Uh this link:

http://www.lowendbox.com/

redirects me to

https://twitter.com/#!/LebAlerts

From their twitter stuff, LEB has been getting DDOS'd for the last day?

They also make a few references to Linode - how are are/were they using their service?

It looks like LEB is hosted on Linode.

http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?t=8530&postdays=0&...

FWIW, Rackspace Cloud's brackets are very closely equivalent to Linode's at almost exactly the same price points. AWS has very different setups with very different price characteristics.

I am looking at going with IntoVPS as they have a good price range and locations that suit my needs. Their plans are similar to Linode's, and you get a bit more traffic and disk space in comparison.

http://www.intovps.com/

Thx! This provider looks very promising. Their price for a large instance is roughly half of Linode's price.

FYI - I just signed up with these guys to try them out. Here's how it went:

1. Account setup was pretty smooth. I was able to create an account without giving my billing details (unlike Linode). However, when I attempted to pay my invoice via their credit card form, authentication failed (maybe because it was an international payment and my bank freaked?). So I tried again Paypal (yuck), and it worked.

2. I received a some welcome emails, one of which had my intovps account password in plain text. Big warning sign that they might not be hashing passwords in their DB.

3. I opened a ticket about #2, and within minutes got this response:

"We don't store any of the passwords as plain text. Since we've received this complaints before I will talk to my colleagues to no longer send the password as plain text."

So a little more encouraging.

I'll try to post updates as I try out their service.

Unfortunately things didn't work out with intovps. They're using OpenVZ (2.6.32 kernel). Apparently it's not possible to run truecrypt on OpenVZ, so I'm going to keep looking for a Xen VPS based provider, starting with http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/VirtualPrivateServerProvid....

Thanks for the update. Good to know that truecrypt doesn't run on OpenVZ, I didn't realise that was a short fall of OpenVZ.

You can try Hostgator VPS or AWS