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