[Catalyst] Web hosting?

[Matt Rosin]

I started this same thread a few months ago and many people were kind
enough to reply.

It seemed a decision between linode.com and slicehost.com.

Slicehost sounds cool and very well may be cool, however it is newer,
has a waiting list (not extremely long), and what got me was that they
say no up front but then require up front just to get early on the
list.

By contrast I have watched linode for a long time, and I had an
awesome chat with its owner caker, who periodically adds new resources
to your account for free, and it seems they have more offerings,
including upcoming HA failover across linodes it seems. Anyway both
have neat looking communities and possibly slicehost has newer
technology but it's a tossup to me, as linode also is not standing
still. Finally they have multiple data centers including one at
Huriccaine Electric which I also had watched for a while. Getting a
linode at HE which is 50-100ms closer was also a big plus. Add to that
a very personal vibe I got from caker, which decided me.

My own decision was to start off with a single linode and also get a
baby account on hostgator, which also was top in reviews. I got it for
some family sites and to hold heavy content like film. Possibly
catalyst might even work in their environment but I am planning on
using the linode for that. Probably the linode will have to be
upgraded with memory. I have not had time to play with it yet so I
can't report on the result, but so far it looks nice and inexpensive.
Since I joined in fact I have gotten a free upgrade already. Granted
VPS companies have to keep up with the market, I left my old one due
to incompetence and overcharging. Possibly slicehost may have
difficulty keeping up but I wish them all luck and wouldn't mind
getting a slice too some time to try out. Both linode and slicehost
give you a choice of distros and root access which should make
catalyst installation easy.

Perhaps someone else can give you their experience but first you might
want to search the archive.

Matt R.