Have tons of VPSs laying around, running all kinds of side projects. Finally have a time to consolidate them.
It is clear that there are several tiers:
– production tier: linode.com, expensive but fast and reliable
– dev tier: any random cheap vps you can find on lowendbox.com
– the uprising star tier that might be good for production: digitialocean, I am amazed by how powerful their admin dashboard is. They really go out of their way to make my life much easier.
Also, I followed this article to download my linode image to the local machine. The key command is:
#reboot linode server to rescue mode #set a new password for root passwd #start sshd /etc/init.d/ssh start #might have to del lines in ~/.ssh/.known_hosts ssh -C root@linode_ip "dd if=/dev/xvda " | dd of=linode.img