There’re so many vendors on the market to offer VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting solutions in the clouds. We have studied many leading vendors’ offers and their forums/feedbacks and finally chosen Linode.

We have been quite happy with Linode’s service so far. The uptime has been great and support has been promptly. During the past three months, we only experienced one short period of downtime due to DDoS. Their support guys usually notify customers in their web site quickly and keep us posted. All support tickets were responded timely.

We also like Linode’s LPM (Linode Platform Manager).

Here’re some options and comparisons of various solutions offered by leading vendors:

1. Linode.com: 360MB RAM/12GB HD/200GB BW at $19.95/month – BEST deal for entry level instance; 540MB RAM/18GB HD/300GB BW at $29.95/month; 1.4GB RAM/48GB HD/800 GB BW at $79.95.

2. Slicehost.com: 256MB RAM/10GB HD/100GB BW at $20/month; 512MB RAM/20Gb HD/200GB BW at $38/month; 1GB RAM/40 GB HD/400GB BW at $70/month.

3. Amazon E2C: 1.7GB RAM/160GB HD at $72/month + Bandwidth @ $0.10/GB. Needs additional backup storage as the instance storage vanishes after crash.

Eric wrote about the ups and downs of working on a startup. It’s a good read and here’s the article.

If you are interested in making a top five list of whatever, check out his Make Five.

Roku Netflix player now plays HD movie over Netflix. Its FAQ says that “The Netflix Player by Roku is HD-ready. Netflix is working to make movies and TV episodes available in HD. When they are ready, your Netflix Player by Roku will also be ready.”

Famous blog site TechCrunch.com which covered many web 2.0 sites went down today. Here’s the screen shot when visiting the site.

BTW, the site runs on Rails, at least its crunchbase.com does.