[peterwwillis]

has the cheapest prices out of any VPS by far

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)

[rms]

I meant cheapest per unit of RAM. Do you know of any decently reliable VPS provider with cheaper prices for 256/512/1024 MB of RAM?

[axod]

Average website backends shouldn't really be limited by RAM unless you're doing some really heavy lifting, or made some bad choices.

I'm more concerned about bandwidth. prgmr is close, but not quite as cheap as linode when it comes to bandwidth.

Depends what your needs are though.

[idlewords]

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.

[axod]

2-4GB? wth are you doing?

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)

[rms]

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.

[axod]

It'd mean writing in some 'un-hip' language. So I doubt anyone would be interested in it here.

Using even 1GB of RAM for something like HN is just crazy.

[peterwwillis]

with a stripped down/custom distro and FastCGI perl i could make that happen. you could go crazy and use an epoll perl httpd too. backend would be nosql with a small cache in memory. you'd need a decent chunk of bandwidth as gzip may push cpu over the edge, and hope you have fast disks. how many hps is HN anyway, at peak?

[skorgu]

How satisfied are you with Kerplunc? Their unmetered VPSen look like an incredible bandwidth deal, almost suspiciously good.

[peterwwillis]

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