Virtual Server Vendor Recommendations?

[Digimer]

On 06/08/2012 12:47 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
> 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.

Privacy concerns were my main focus when looking for a home. I'm lucky 
in that, in the clustering world and in the hacker-space community, I've 
come to know many people from various EU countries. Though none are 
perfect, it is better, and that was enough for me.

Since I setup, Iceland I think has gone even further in privacy 
protection. Might be worth looking there, too.

-- 
Digimer
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