[mreithub]

My guess is that especially if you're shopping in the 5$ price range, there's gonna be a much more important factor than some benchmark results: Availability and cost of extra features.

For java apps you're probably go for as much RAM as possible (giving Linode the edge here) OVH.com for example has an S3-like object store or alternatively, physical NAS hardware (amongst a bunch of other extras). I personally am currently looking to keep the traffic cost at a minimum (DO still doesn't charge for extra traffic but plan to do so in the future [1], Scaleway and OVH have unlimited traffic).

Some of the ones I've looked into recently also provide DDoS protection and/or load balancing while others apparently null-route your IP(s) until you can get them on the phone[2] (DDoS protection seems to be a pretty costly feature to offer).

Since all of the described (and I guess most of the discussed) services provide fast provisioning, it should be relatively easy to jump ship if you later find out you picked the wrong service.

[1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577465

A little anecdote: About half a day after I've started using vultr, I got an abuse message from their SPAM detection system claiming that one of my IPs was sending loads of spam emails prompting me to respond within 48 hours (everything looked like my server was flagged automatically). The problem was, the time of the incident was about 12hours before I even created the instance in question. The issue was resolved quickly (there wasn't a lot to argue about after all) and I haven't had problems since, but nevertheless this leaves me wondering whether they (or another provider like them) might end up blocking my account one day simply because I missed an email. But you can't really expect premium service for dirt-cheap products, can you ;)

edit: formatting