(alternatively, convertible debt)
Piggybacking on YC's selection process seems like a good business model in general.
But yea, if any YC company needs free hosting (and really, hosting is so cheap these days that it's all pretty much free) I'd be happy to give it to them. I'm younger than linode, but I've been renting Xen VPSs since 2005, which makes me older than slicehost, I believe.
I'm not asking you to go exclusive or anything (in fact, I think that's a bad idea. don't host all your stuff with the same provider.)
That said, I'd be a little surprised if any of the YC companies have to pay for hosting. Many, many ISPs would be happy to give away a little bandwidth in exchange for some publicity.
Slicehost has been doing Xen hosting longer. Linode is older, but they were using User Mode Linux (not nearly as good as Xen) for a long time. Slicehost got the mindshare by getting to Xen hosting first.
Slicehost is local to all their data centers. Whether in St Louis or Dallas/Ft Worth, their employees actually work there. Linode's employees all work in South Jersey, 2 hours from their Newark data center and inaccessible to their other data centers. Kinda indicates that they have other people setting up a lot of their stuff.
Linode is often out of stock or having limited stock. This might just be that Slicehost doesn't tell us how the sausage is made and Linode does.
Linode tops out at 2880MB. Slicehost offers instances going up to 15.5GB. That's a major difference if you want to try scaling up easily and there is a huge difference between trying to get your site to handle traffic on a 3GB server and a 15GB server.
Backups are a nice touch.
The Rackspace name lends a "they're the big game in town" to their service.
They aren't that much more expensive. Linode charges a constant $0.0555. . . per MB of RAM. At the 2GB level, Slicehost is charging $0.634 per MB of RAM. That means that if you were to get 2GB servers from each, the Slicehost would cost you $130 and the Linode would cost you $114. It is cheaper, but it isn't so significantly cheaper.
Slicehost can more easily upgrade your plan. Linode has to switch your box should you want to move plans. Often Slicehost can move plans while keeping you on the same box.
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Now, none of that may matter to you. It doesn't to me and that's why I'm a Linode customer. However, for many these are considerations. If you're running a business, having instances top out at 3GB is a concern. Would you pay a 13% premium for Slicehost just for the knowledge that you can upgrade beyond 3GB of RAM should the need arise? If I had a person project where downtime for migration would be embarrassing, I would.
Likewise, some might care that the Slicehost people actually work in the area rather than colo-ing boxes with places like The Planet.
I'm very happy with Linode, but I can see why many would choose Slicehost.
Bandwidth overage on slicehost is .30/GB. On Linode it's .10/GB. That's a fairly massive difference.
I'm on slicehost, and when I upgraded ("resized") a slice, it was not a "live" operation. I don't know whether it's physically the same machine, but the old slice had to be shutdown, file system copied, and a new slice booted.
From the "Resize your slice" page:
Step 3: Current slice is shut down and migrated You will experience a downtime varying in proportion to fullness of the filesystem.
I find that I always hit cpu limits way before memory becomes an issue.
Maybe its because Slicehost offers backups?
Though I'm still itching to find something just like Slicehost but with gigabit on the private network.
I'm not saying that makes them objectively better in every way, but it's just an answer to your non-question. ;)
I noticed the list mentions Justin.tv hosts itself. Aren't they built on Amazon EC2 and S3?
If you can stay under 3 TB/month 1and1 also has some decent servers for the money.
I pay like $26/mo. for my 512MB VPS. It's $0.03/hr which is $21.90/mo. but you pay $0.22/GB out, and $0.08/GB in. I don't use a whole lot of bandwidth though.
I miss you, Softlayer :(
*edit--damn no one likes sarcasm around here