Slicehost Vs Linode.com - A Comparitive Review

A friend and I both recently purchased VPS "slices" for various reasons. I joined linode.com and he joined slicehost, agreeing that we'd share opinions and experiences with each other to see which one was the better deal.

Up front, slicehost gives a better first impression - but that's subjective - so we were at first both inclined to buy from them. That's when we learned about linode through WHT.

We both got a low-end slice - he got the 256MB slice from slicehost, I got the 360MB slice from linode.

After about 2 months of service with both companies, I can definitely say that they've lived up to both their reputations. We haven't experienced any downtimes from either of them, performance has never felt sluggish (although the extra ram from linode certainly helps!), and support has been quick to respond from both companies.

I think the thing about our particular situation, though, is that we're both very familiar with linux systems, so apart from the initial set up phase where we wanted to make sure we got the right distro (CentOS 5 users here), we haven't heavily used either administrative web apps. Most of our access after day 1 has been ssh to our machines to install various components, mostly ruby, rails, mysql, rubygems, apache, and the rest of the web app stack.

For our situation, both these companies met expectations, and I give them a thumbs up to potential customers that are on the fence for whatever reason. That said, I'm giving the slight edge to linode, because you're getting basically the same service but with more RAM at the same price.