Virtual Server Vendor Recommendations?

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Digimer <lists-5ZoueyuiTZiw5LPnMra/2Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 06/08/2012 11:59 AM, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
>>
>> I currently serve web pages and email from my home server.  The traffic
>> seems quite low, but I never check how low, because it never mattered.
>>
>> Now, I am looking to move this server offsite, preferably in Canada (for
>> latency/legal reasons (hosting in the US (the land of the Free TM) is
>> not acceptable)).  I'd rather not spend much money, but I far prefer
>> full control over the machine, but not necessarily the hardware.  To me
>> that says renting a Virtual Private Server somewhere.
>>
>> So, how do I estimate traffic, RAM, CPU usage so I know if I need a fast
>> machine?
>>
>> Also, who do you recommend as a vendor of VPSs?
>
> When I went searching for a host, I landed on a German company's DC. If you
> want to check the lag, ping alteeve.com. The company is called Hetzner
> (http://www.hetzner.de/en/), came highly rated to me, and I have been happy
> so far. You get bare-iron, remote reboot, etc. It's not full featured, but I
> found it to be good value. I've been running love on them for about six
> months now.

I'd be leery of putting a server in Europe, as I haven't enough
connections to the continent to have a good feel for their data
privacy laws, which I gather are rather more extensive than here.

Going to a not-well-understood jurisdiction might jump you from one
set of perceived legal problems into another.

If I was particularly worried about third party surveillance, I'd be
looking further afield, though I'm not sufficiently paranoid to think
it logical to try to head to a would-be data haven like the
Principality of Sealand
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand>.  Something
similar made an entertaining novel plot in Cryptonomicon, but, the
world NOT working the way Ayn Rand imagined in Atlas Shrugged, those
sorts of things seem not to work well, as noted here
<http://socialmediacollective.org/2012/04/01/why-data-havens-dont-work/>.

But I'm not terribly optimistic that going afield *really* solves the
problems, and the "Why Data Havens Don't Work" essay describes the
shortcomings pretty successfully.

In principle, the 'simplest' jurisdiction ought to be Canada, in that
this introduces no new legal issues that you aren't already party to.
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