Ever since 2011, I’ve been singing the praises of owning your own virtual chunk of hardware. For anyone who has the least bit of Linux proficiency, getting a VPS is a great way to have full control over your hosting and server solutions on a budget. With plenty of consumer experience in the low-end sector of virtual servers, I’ve narrowed down my current haul to a select few, keeping the ones that have been most reliable to me for antoher renewal cycle.

Specs are formatted as follows: RAM/DISK/BW@SPEED

BuyVM

This was the first VPS I’ve ever purchased, and it is by far my favorite when it comes to quick support times and overall communication with customers. I’m actually trying to downgrade a 256MB server to 128MB, and they’re willing to transfer the same IP over. In addition to their great staff, uptime is usually teriffic and they were one of the first to go out of their way and create a custom management panel of their own (before Solpocalypse happened).

Specs: OVZ 128MB/15GB/500GB@1Gb
Use: Static sites with nginx, secondary DNS hosting

eoReality

These guys may be a bit unknown but this has been a pretty reliable one for me. They switched to full SSD for all their servers a few months ago and things seem to fly on this server (I used it for CS:GO and the only limiting factor was the latency). For some odd reason they have been delisted from LEB

Specs: OVZ 1GB/25GB/1TB@100Mb
Use: Application development (RoR, PHP, etc)

BlueVM

What can I say, I got one from them because of a good KVM deal going on. Plus they pretty much have every ISO under the sun (Linux and Windows).

Specs: KVM 512MB/20GB/1TB@1Gb
Use: Windows stuff obviously.

Semoweb

Main reason I’ve got these people is because it was well-spec’d for a $1/m server and it’s close to my physical location (I work about 5 minutes from Hostdime/Atlantic.net’s DC). Also has excellent uptime with no issues accessing it since day one!

Specs: OVZ 256MB/15GB/300GB@100Mb
Use: Primary DNS

Chunkhost (free)

Free. And Xen. And refer people for more resources. What’s not to like? (Well, the inactivity deactivation is one thing.)

Specs: Xen starting at 128MB/3GB/35GB@1Gb, doubles for every 2^n referrals
Use: Tunneling/VPN