Linode has just announced a significant increase in the amount of RAM in each of their plans [1].
The last time I compared virtual hosting prices in a serious manner was over two years ago [2], so it seems like a good time to compare the prices again.
Now there are some differences between these providers that make things difficult to compare. Gandi used to not include the OS in the disk allocation – presumably they did de-duplication, I’m not sure if they still do that. OpenVZ/Virtuozzo and Xen can’t be directly compared. OpenVZ is an Operating System Level Virtualisation that allows virtual machines to share resources to some extent which should allow better overall utilisation of the system but may allow someone to hog more resources than they deserve – I prefer virtual machines so tend to avoid that. Virtuozzo is a technology I’m not familiar with so with all things being equal I would choose Xen because I know it better.
Years ago Vpsland deleted one of my DomUs without good notification and without keeping a backup and I’m not about to forgive them. XenEurope and Gandi get good reviews, but I have no personal experience with them so in my personal ranking they are below Linode and Slicehost.
RapidXen offers native IPv6 – a very noteworthy feature. But they are quite expensive.
Note that I have only included providers that advertise in English. I could use Google translation to place an order on a non-English web site but I am not going to risk a situation where Google translation is needed for technical support.
In the price comparison tables I have used $US for price comparisons, where the price was advertised in another currency I put the $US price in brackets. For every provider that doesn’t advertise prices in $US I used XE.com to get a spot price. Note that if you convert between currencies you will not get that rate, I used the spot rate because most of my readers don’t use the $US as their native currency (either due to living in a country that uses it or having business interests based on the $US) – converting from $AU to $US has about the same overhead for me as converting to the Euro or pound.
The bandwidth is listed as either a number of Gigabytes per month that can be transferred or as a number of Megabits per second that the connection may use.
I have tried to roughly order the offerings based on how good they seem to be. But as there are so many factors to consider it’s quite obvious that no provider can be considered to be universally better than the others.
The biggest surprise for me was how well Xen Europe compares to the others. Last time I did the comparison they were not nearly as competitive.
Finally note that I am comparing the options for low-end servers. These are services that are useful for hobbyist use and low-end servers for commercial use. Some providers such as Xen Europe exclude themselves from consideration for serious commercial use by not offering big servers – Xen Europe only supports up to 1GB of RAM.
Prices of Xen virtual servers:
| ISP | RAM | Disk | Bandwidth | Price |
| XenEurope | 128M | 10G | 1TB | E5 ($6.15) |
| XenEurope | 512M | 30G | 1TB | E17.50 ($21.52) |
| Linode | 512M | 16G | 200GB | $20 |
| Slicehost | 256M | 10G | 150GB | $20 |
| Slicehost | 512M | 20G | 300GB | $38 |
| Gandi | 256M | 8G +OS? | 5Mb/s | $16 |
| Gandi | 512M | 16G +OS? | 10Mb/s | $32 |
| RapidXen | 256M | 20G | 2Mb/s | $20 |
| RapidXen | 512M | 20G | 2Mb/s | $30 |
| Rimuhosting | 160M | 4G | 30GB | $20 |
| Rimuhosting | 400M | 8G | 150GB | $30 |
Prices of non-Xen virtualisation systems:
| ISP | Virtualisation | RAM | Disk | Bandwidth | Price |
| Quantact | OpenVZ | 256M | 15G | 300GB | $15 |
| Quantact | OpenVZ | 512M | 35G | 600GB | $35 |
| FreeVPS | VMWare | 256M | 10G | 100GB | #10UK ($14.76) |
| FreeVPS | VMWare | 512M | 20G | 200GB | #15UK ($22.14) |
| Vpsland | Virtuozzo | 512M | 10G | 250GB | $20 |
| Vpsland | Virtuozzo | 1024M | 20G | 500GB | $35 |
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