I use Linode for my primary site and prgmr as the backup. Both are excellent. Prgmr is not for newbies, you submit a public key with your order and get back a login to a XEN console. My hosts there seem to be fine, no problems yet.
This is not accurate. There are many VPS's which are cheaper, many of which have much greater capacity for the money. Some are fly-by-night scams. Others have several years of stability with good support. Check forums and VPS review sites to find the best match.
That said, I have nothing against prgmr or linode and would use them if I needed a super-reliable VPS. (My main VPS is Linode, my secondary is with Kerplunc Hosting)
That's simply false. RAM is the constraint of interest for plenty of single-server websites that are running MySQL as a backend. You want a bunch of memory for the database, plus enough left over to accommodate your web app. That often means wanting a 2-4 GB machine.
Linode is something like $55/GB RAM per month, while prgmr.com is $14.
I remember a post on here saying how hackernews was running on a new 8GB server or something. There's no reason it couldn't run on a 200MB server easily.
(Related: Is HN really sluggish for everyone else as well? Like 3-4 seconds per page load)
If you really think you could run HN on 200MB of RAM, write a blog post about how to do it and submit it here. I'm sure the community would like to know how. I think your ability to write applications using minimal amounts of RAM is out of sync with the median RAM use here.
haven't had it for long enough , but the bandwidth seems spotty (sometimes 500k, sometimes 2mbit, etc) and seemingly high ssh latency, maybe cpu load on my slice. but other'n that good so far