I run an AWS micro-instance, which is no-frills and bulletproof. It’s very pay-as-you-go, but the light usage I put it through results in a bill that’s about half what I used to pay for Slicehost/Rackspace.
That’s really interesting. I would never have considered a “cloud” hosting platform. I just figured it for web and other intermittent/transaction-based services, rather than persistent server instances. I’ll have to do some research.
No-frills is a-ok with me. All I want is CPU/RAM on the Internet.
If you’re interested in low latency, these are some Ping time samples from some different countries I’ve gathered the past few days:
http://pastebin.java-gaming.org/40465052e
The VPS is located in Seatle.
(PS, just updated my game 
)
I wouldn’t suggest anyone else but Linode for a VPS. I have been with them for about 2 years on and off now as my wallet allows and I love everything about their services.
I appreciate all the responses. It sounds like Linode is the general preference. They’ve been at/near the top of my list for some time. Seeing how DreamHost just randomly rebooted my VPS again last night (where I run the Island Forge beta game server), I’m eager to try something new.
Since DreamHost isn’t here to defend themselves, I will note that they have a 100% uptime policy, which they stand behind. They calculated that my server was down for 3 hours, so credited my account for $0.50 (yes, 50 cents).
I don’t really care for my money back when shit happens. I prefer to pay more, for the shit not to happen
Well put! My motivation exactly.
Was with hostrocket for years until they got hacked into oblivion. Then jumped ship to DreamHost for a year or two but never got round to uploading anything. My account lapsed… The next place has to be somewhere that will let me run java stuff so I can crash test some of my gaming projects.
DreamHost shared Web hosting is certainly not the place to run anything Java (they don’t even offer/allow Tomcat for servlets, if you’re into that sort of thing). You need their VPS (or Dedicated) service to run your own server code, etc.
Ah, excellent, just the kind of advice I was looking for. And I didn’t even have to ask ;D
If you’re just starting out to play around with servers and don’t have the budget to pay 20€/month then I’d suggest you try http://123systems.net/ it’s just 3$/month and you get your own VPS (virtual computer).
I have used quite a few before I stumbled upon linode and never looked back. I used rimuhosting and slicehost before.
I need the shell access as a root and I can say I never had my server rebooted in the las 2.5 years with linode. I rebooted it myself whenever I needed to but they never did. Support is just amazing and the total control you have…oh love it.
As for uptime and money back, I couldn’t care less. I need uptime and access to it as ideally the server generates more money than 50 cents an hour.
I was also made aware of a new hosting company for Java apps. http://jelastic.com/.
They claim to run any Java app.
I have only signed up with them but never had the time to properly play with it. Someone mentioned needing Java support for testing, this might be the place to go for free. I think the free account doesn’t allow top level domains, but for testing one can get away with a subdomain.
I’ve been using http://kattare.com for years. Very impressed with their uptime, support, and Java knowledge.
It seems that VPS is now the rage though (kattare is managed hosting).
Apart from the obvious (e.g. it won’t stop you from doing an rm -rf / as root) are there any other drawbacks to VPS?
VPS just gives basically a computer on the internet where you can run your java application in (or any other application). If you only want to host a website then VPS probably isn’t the best way since you’d have to do a lot of configuration etc from scratch and install apache manually or some such and basically spend all of your time hosting your website instead of creating your website. But you could still beautifully use the VPS to host a website + your programs if you so desire.
I’m currently still using DreamHost VPS. They’re very Web-site oriented, so it actually took some steps to make the server unmanaged and turn off apache, which is installed and running by default. Once I had that worked out, it’s a basic VPS and reasonably priced. They have a slider control in their panel for configuring the RAM on the fly, with extra cost per MB (computed per minute I think). You could also adjust RAM programatically via their API, if you wanted to get real fancy. So far, I’m operating on the lowest rung (300MB).
Just having a VPS is great. It’s very liberating to be able to run server software on a machine other than the one under my desk.
if you live in the UK I’d recommend JVMhost.com. They’re really friendly, and inexpensive too! But if you’re in the US like I am their servers might be a little laggy (Note: or it could just be my bad programming). Anyway they’re like < $10 so give them a shot if you ever need a VPS :>
I can agree with the generally positive comments about Linode. Had a server with them for well over a year now and it’s only been rebooted once - and that was to take advantage of some extra disk space they were giving me as a free upgrade 
Wow! Bookmarked.
is 123systems good for testing? and hold a website with hardly any traffic?
For european folks I can recommend Xencon, it’s based on Xen (so you get dedicated memory and disk resources) and thus more appropriate for serious usage than cheap virtualization solutions that overaggregates these resources. They have good support and the prices are nice too. Been using them for more than 2 years and have 829 days uptime on the VPS