I had been hosting this site on a 256MB VPS from Slicehost for just over 2 years in their Dallas datacenter. Overall, it was a great service (and a much needed upgrade from Dreamhost), with only 3 unscheduled reboots over those years. However, my weekly monitoring reports from Browsermob never hit 100% uptime across their global servers. A typical report looked like this:

Slicehost (Dallas) VPS weekly uptime

Location	Response Time	Checks	Failures	Availability
Amsterdam	5.94 secs	192	26	86.5%
Dallas, TX	1.04 secs	166	0	100%
Dublin, Ireland	2.28 secs	140	0	100%
New York City	6.01 secs	196	33	83.2%
SF Bay Area, CA	1.3 secs	163	0	100%
Singapore	3.83 secs	170	0	100%
Washington, DC	1.1 secs	174	0	100%

Over 4 months of monitoring, between 1 and 3 locations would fail to reach 100% availability each week. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if any other VPS service could do any better. I signed up for a Linode 512 plan and ported over this site, which had the following relevant configuration:

• CentOS 5.3
• Apache 2.2
• MySQL 5
• WordPress 2.1

The change in the Browsermob profile was immediate. The first full week of running on Linode in their Fremont datacenter looked like this:

Linode (Fremont) VPS weekly uptime

Location	Response Time	Checks	Failures	Availability
Amsterdam	2.06 secs	84	0	100%
Dallas, TX	1.05 secs	84	0	100%
Dublin, Ireland	1.9 secs	83	0	100%
New York City	1.27 secs	84	0	100%
SF Bay Area, CA	672 ms	84	0	100%
Singapore	2.37 secs	84	0	100%
Tokyo	1.58 secs	83	0	100%
Washington, DC	1.15 secs	84	0	100%

(The drop in number of checks is due to a drop in the daily allowance for free Browsermob accounts, in addition to an increase of one new location in Tokyo.)

Diving into the data some more, I found that the range of response times across the globe were also substantially improved. The response time chart in my profile showed a clear improvement at the time of the switch on July 4:

	Slicehost	Linode	% improvement
Average response time (ms)	1889	1513	19.91%
Response time stdev	1161	638.7	44.95%
Coefficent of variation	0.6141	0.4221	31.26%

So, for the same price ($20/month), Linode was able to deliver almost 20% improvement in average global response time along with a much tighter standard deviation.

At the time that I switched, the 256 Slicehost plan cost the same as the 512 Linode plan. Slicehost has since changed their pricing to almost match Linode.