[tlug] User-mode Linux hosting?

[Michael Smith <smith@example.com>]

Is anybody on the list running a User-mode Linux server through a
hosting service?

I'm running a User-mode Linux "virtual machine" hosted through
Bytemark[1], and have been happy with the quality of the service.

  [1] http://www.bytemark.co.uk/

Their technical staff are highly competent and responsive, they
have excellent online documentation, and I have never once run
into outages or problems caused by them (except for brief
scheduled maintenance downtime announced far in advance).

The downside is in price & performance. They charge 150 pounds per
year for a 64MB RAM / 3GB disk space / 15GB max.  bandwidth plan.
The disk space and bandwidth limits are fine for me, and I can get
more of both if I need it, at reasonable rates.

But to get more RAM, I would need to move to a 128 MB plan, which
costs 270 pounds a year. That's a pretty big jump.

I am running a pretty minimal set of server applications on it;
basically, just SMTP and IMAP, plus Apache and MySQL. But also
Spamassassin and Snort, which eat up a lot of RAM (yeah, maybe I
need to move to a spam solution that needs less RAM...).

So, when I check top(1), I often see something like this:

  Mem:  60656k total,  59380k used,  1276k free, 1104k buffers
  Swap: 262136k total, 178152k used, 83984k free, 6856k cached

Meaning, I've got about 60MB of physical memory, with around 59MB
of it being used, and 170MB+ of my 256MB swap space in use.

The only place where I actually care much about the performance
hit is in the web server. If I had more physical memory, I think
it might make a significant difference in how quickly it could
serve up pages.

So, I'm wondering if anybody else has a hosting service they're
using and are happy with and that has a higher-RAM plan at a more
reasonable price that Bytemark's.

  --Mike

P.S.,
I know already about Redwood Virtual (US$200 for a 128MB plan,
$400 or a 256MB plan), but it's hard to guess much about the
quality of their service based just on the information at their
website, which is pretty minimal. And I see that there's now a
note at their site saying, "We are currently at full capacity. We
will have more virtual servers available soon. Please check back
in a few weeks.", which is not terrifically encouraging.

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