I'd like to see what kind of VPS providers Hubskians prefer. I've come across RamNode and Linode as a couple of great providers, and have used RamNode for the past few weeks for general experimentation. What are some other hosts I should know about?
I'm liking Hetzner (Germany) and Minivps (.co.uk) at the moment, the latter cheaper. Clustered.Net (UK) was also rock solid but too expensive in the end.
I've been very happy with Digital Ocean for the past half year or so.
I received a free $25 credit for DigitalOcean which I used to test their services, and I personally wasn't happy with their performance. The I/O was horrible for what was SSD. I ran a droplet with ONLY TeamSpeak3 running and would often enough encounter stutter due to latency issues with a even a small group of 3-4 people. They may have improved since I discontinued their services (3 months ago). In any case, I was only using it on a trial basis. With my impression of it however, I'd say it would be fine for a developer looking for an alternative to Heroku/GoogleAppEngine/AWS/etc, but I wouldn't use it for anything which was meant for production use.
Fair enough, I have only used it for development and personal projects.
Two resources I often use when looking for a VPS are the following. * LowEndBox.com * ServerBear.com Both of those are great resources. The LEB community has a pretty solid userbase which reports back in the comment sections leaving feedback on performance and support from the company being written about, and there are also a lot of specials made for LEB users for a reduced price and/or free upgrades. ServerBear is more of a data driven site, and can quickly give you results based on your requirements and rank one VPS against others for comparison. Very nice. Personally speaking, I've had great service from the below providers. Almost all of my VPS are from BuyVM.net these days though. * BuyVM * SimpleNode * Prometeus * RamNode LowEndSpirit is a SUPER cheap option, but you're limited in what you can run because of the low RAM available on their plans. It would be more than suitable to run a VPN through for example, but I wouldn't rely on it to reliably service any moderate traffic site. Regardless of who you end up choosing, be sure to do the research into the company beforehand and also check out LEB/ServerBear and various coupon sites to see if there are promos going on which can score you some discount or free upgrade options. Oh, also. Certain providers run out of stock (because they don't like to oversell and cause performance degradation in doing so -- mainly an issue with OpenVZ), and LowEndStock is a good place to monitor some of the popular providers which are in high demand.
I suggest reading "Which VPN Service Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?," an article on TorrentFreak. Another article on TorrentFreak I would suggest reading: "How To Make VPNs Even More Secure." Personally, I prefer to run my own VPN for $10/$15 a year using a cheap 128MB VPS from either BuyVM [the best] or 123Systems [don't respond to support tickets]. You can also use it for other such as running a very small seedbox or web seed, or a bittorrent tracker. The problem with this is that if you use legitimate details, the VPN could be traced back to you, but that's the same with VPNs that use a dedicated IP address who will cut you off, but using a shared IP address could mean a couple of software conflicts. Edit: Whoops, I thought you said "VPN" not "VPS." A VPS provider I would highly recommend: Linode. It is a bit expensive compared to other VPS providers, but it is worth it. It has tons of great features, is always up, and support is very helpful. Their entire clusters are built from scratch, and as I understand it they own all their hardware. They're also one of the more reputable VPS providers out there.
If you are worried about logging, you should note that in many countries, there are data retention laws which require the logging of select data for a set period of time. You'll want to find a host provider which is in a country where such laws are ruled unconstitutional or simply do not exist. You can find a list for this task here.
PPTP isn't secure. Avoid PPTP. In truth, it is dead. OpenVPN has much better encryption, can bypass censorship and is better suited for computers and laptops on the go. There are other protocols but they are less used. L2TPs use is dwindling, IPSEC is too hard, and SSTP is generally only used in networks and countries where PPTP is blocked, as well, it is rarely provided with the exception of StrongVPN, which keeps logs. Go with OpenVPN. I would do your own research or ask someone else, though. I'm not an expert in this field.