RIMU Rules
In an effort to put an end to the endless time sink of hardware problems on the small cooperative ISP I run, I’ve decided to outsource the responsibility of actually taking care of hardware and move most of the operations to a virtual private server. Part of our hosting is actually already on a VPS, but the service there has been lackluster: sometimes disk space is mysteriously unavailable; we don’t always get the promised amount of memory; throughput is slower than we’d like; customer support usually gives us cryptic responses about what was wrong and how they fixed it after a few hours; etc.. (Not to give them too bad a name, but the provider here was SPRY.)
We decided to find a new provider. Lots of people had good things to say about RIMU Hosting, and after just a day it’s becoming clear to me that they are an excellent provider. Tech support (even before we signed up) was incredibly responsive; the packages of virtual servers or dedicated hardware seem like an excellent value; and my first impression is that there is none of the VPS flakiness that seemed to permeate our prior provider. It looks and feels like a real machine: top provides an accurate task list that reflects the memory we really have, dmesg gives realistic kernel-like output, etc.
In such a short period of time, I can’t genuinely claim that RIMU Rules, but I will say that they rule so far. They also have a Debian developer discount, as well as a discount for hosting multiple machines with them.