EDIT: Anyone cares to explain his reasons behind a downvote?
Your post reminds me of the burden of proof fallacy, in which you create work for other people by asking questions you could easily answer yourself.
If you or anybody posts the comparison you requested, it will surely be upvoted.
NodeServ: $1.25/month = 50GB HDD, 512MB RAM, 1 core, 1TB bandwidth, location in Jacksonville.
Host.us: $6/month = 150GB HDD, 6GB RAM, 4 cores, 5.12TB bandwidth, location in Dallas.
Both deals found on LowEndBox.
That's not to say getting a 8GB openVZ vps for $4 a month isn't an amazing deal, but just that there are caveats.
For the most part it's reasonable, but there's a freaking litany of reasonable things you're not allowed to run, including IRC, audio/video streaming, game servers, and so on.
Why on earth do you sell me X block of resources for Y$/month if you're going to tell me what I can and can't do with them? Surely unreasonable use would be covered by resource limits already in place?
I have a bunch of sites running on it without stepping on each other, and I doubt that would be the case on AWS / Google / DO.
They're also typically leased for at least a full month and can't be spun up/down on demand like you can with these services.
Plus they focus on large (>16GB) dedicated servers.
1. Mission-critical/Production ready reliability and communication (all maintenance and issues)
2. No unexpected termination of instances / Reasonable warning & mediation
3. Not overprovisioned / little concern of noisy neighbors
4. Tier 3/4 redundancies
5. Strong American coverage (each DC with Tier 3/4 level services)
6. No setup fee on new instances
7. 1-minute provisioning (simple creation of instances / no ticket needed for deleting resource)
8. Programmatic IaaS management including provisioning, DNS, and images
9. Quality resources - mostly Xeons not ARMs, local SSD not Ceph
10. Huge backing - they're not closing tomorrow & I wanted a #10
While OVH, Hetzner, Leaseweb seem like nice services, particularly for needs in Europe, I can't build an American-centric service on those, set it and forget it nearly as easily or worry-free as with DO/Linode/Vultr/Lightsail.
Price breakdown vs DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, OVH, and Online.net / Scaleway:
$5/mo
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 512MB | 1 | 20GB SSD | 1TB |
| DO | 512MB | 1 | 20GB SSD | 1TB |
| VULTR | 768MB | 1 | 15GB SSD | 1TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 1GB | 1 | 25GB SSD | 2TB |
| OVH | 2GB | 1 | 10GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (virtual) | 2GB | 2 | 50GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 1GB | 1 | 30GB SSD | 2TB |
| DO | 1GB | 1 | 30GB SSD | 2TB |
| VULTR | 1GB | 1 | 20GB SSD | 2TB |
| Linode | 2GB | 1 | 24GB SSD | 2TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 2GB | 2 | 50GB SSD | 5TB |
| OVH | 4GB | 1 | 20GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (virtual) | 8GB | 8 | 200GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Online.net (dedicated) | 4GB | 2 | 120GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 2GB | 1 | 40GB SSD | 3TB |
| DO | 2GB | 2 | 40GB SSD | 3TB |
| VULTR | 2GB | 2 | 45GB SSD | 3TB |
| Linode | 4GB | 2 | 48GB SSD | 3TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 4GB | 2 | 100GB SSD | 8TB |
| OVH | 8GB | 2 | 40GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (dedicated) | 16GB | 8 | 50GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Online.net (dedicated) | 16GB | 8 | 250GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 4GB | 2 | 60GB SSD | 4TB |
| DO | 4GB | 2 | 60GB SSD | 4TB |
| VULTR | 4GB | 4 | 45GB SSD | 4TB |
| Linode | 8GB | 4 | 96GB SSD | 4TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 16GB | 4 | 400GB SSD | 20TB |
| OVH | 8GB | 2 | 40GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (dedicated) | 32GB | 8 | 50GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Online.net (dedicated) | 32GB | 8 | 750GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Provider | RAM | Cores | Storage | Transfer |
| ---------------------- | ----- | ----- | ---------- | -------- |
| LightSail | 8GB | 2 | 80GB SSD | 5TB |
| DO | 8GB | 4 | 80GB SSD | 5TB |
| VULTR | 8GB | 6 | 150GB SSD | 5TB |
| Linode | 12GB | 6 | 192GB SSD | 8TB |
| Hetzner (virtual) | 32GB | 8 | 600GB SSD | 30TB |
| Hetzner (dedicated) | 64GB | 8 | 1024GB SSD | 30TB |
| OVH | 8GB | 2 | 40GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Scaleway (dedicated) | 32GB | 8 | 50GB SSD | ∞TB |
| Online.net (dedicated) | 64GB | 8 | 1500GB SSD | ∞TB |
There also have no setup cost for these dedicated servers.
But Amazon will lower your CPU quota as well, if you use it for too long, so it’s not like the numbers of Amazon themselves even really mean anything.
The same story with storage performance – Amazon’s is horrible, but it’s network-attached.
I downvoted you because you talked about your downvotes.
Don't interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
Write your post and live with the results.
It's a small business run by a few people (though it's been around for 10 years, so a pretty stable one), which has the pros and cons that go along with that. The tech staff is good, techies who know what they're doing and generally assume that you do also. So if you send a request or problem report, you aren't going to get a form reply that asks if you tried turning it off and back on again. But it's just a handful of people, so if there's a major issue, fixing things is pretty manual and slower than at places that have armies of 24/7 devops staff.
One specific thing I really like about it: it gives you SSH access to a proper text console, in case you want to install a custom OS, recover a broken install, etc. Most VPS providers give you console access, but most do it via VNC in the browser, which is not my favorite way to do sysadmin work.