I'm curious what experiences anyone has had with VPS hosting companies such as Linode, Slicehost or ServerAxis. I'm potentially looking to move my mail and some other things off into one, so not much server power or RAM is needed. My goal is to come in around $25 or less a month.

So far, I'm leaning towards Linode, though the ServerAxis pay as you go for bandwidth plans sound tempting as well.

You might want to check out Gandi's, too. I have no experience with their VPS service, but I've been using them as a domain registrar for ages, and I've been very pleased with them as a company.

Looks like a good service, seems they give you a mbit/s limit per share, instead of a generic monthly transfer limit. From what I can tell, they are a French company and host out of France somewhere, so that would bump up latency a bit for anything realtime on the box. Not a big deal for e-mail, but I may host a small Ventrilo (4 people or so) server on it as well.

This seems to have a good list of 10 providers:
http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/top-vps-providers/

So many choices...

I'd hesitate to move a mail server to a VPS of any sort. Many of their IPs are blacklisted, as spammers can figure out how to set up a hosting account pretty easily.

Matthew

You'll get that from any type of hosting though really. I know I had to really fight to get some Verio colo IPs removed from the various lists and even then I wasn't 100% successful. Some of them once you're on the list, you're on there forever stupidly.

What is blacklisted like crazy everywhere are the Amazon EC2 IPs. It seems to be a haven for spammers and attackers. Amazon at one point just terminated that particular instance and let the spammer/attack create more. I'm unsure whether they still follow that policy.

I'm very pleased with Linode. I haven't needed the support much, but when I need it they're very knowledgeable and quick in responding.

You said you want to pay around $25, which means you either get the 360 or 540 (the latter would cost around $30.) You can upgrade/downgrade at any time, so you could start with the 360 and see if you need to bump up for more RAM or whatever.

I signed up for Gandi this weekend to try out, and so far I've been pleased. Ping time from my house is around 130ms and stable, so it should work out for e-mail just fine. Overall, the dedicated transfer rate instead of a monthly transfer limit is what won me over. While I don't think I'd hit certain limits elsewhere, it's just nice to not worry about it at all. Should make doing offsite backups much easier.

As for spam, the IP I got isn't showing as blocked in any of the major filters, so thats a good sign.

Total cost looks like it will run me $16 a month for the base package, and $2 more for 8 extra GB worth of disk space. I'll probably migrate the boards there as well at some point, just to avoid paying for two different hosting solutions.

You gotta love a company whose motto is "No Bullshit".