Do you have your own VPS or Dedicated server?

Not at the moment, have been looking recently though.

Unmanaged VPS from Linode, the price/performance ratio is unbelievable. The learning curve was exceptional but It's a fantastic reward starting from a clean slate to getting a website online.

I couldn't agree more. I do not currently have a VPS as I recently cancelled due to not really needing it but Linode was a great provider. I will be going back to them in the future.

I runs a few properties on a VPS, pretty neat. Had it for a few years now.

I run a dedicated server for my website activities. I purchased one that is double the amount I need but while some would call that a waste of money, I call it comfort in knowing I have a lot (and I mean a lot haha) of room to play on

I got a dedicated server in 2001 after a bunch of my web design clients all agreed to host their sites with me. I stopped designing in 2009 but luckily by then I was earning just about enough from my own sites to cover the monthly rental. I wouldn't like to go back to shared hosting ... ... and am currently budgeting for a server upgrade over the next couple of years to something oodles more powerful, my own little uber-server if you like.

Dojo, if you shop around, you can find some fairly decent hosting on a dedicated box for under 100 bucks per month.

Anyone have any experience with cloud vps's - or cloud hosting in general?

Other than the fact I block them?

It's my experience that many VPS providers aren't too picky about who they have as customers. There are a few in particular that I ban from the server on sight (iWeb and Leaseweb being the two worse offenders).

You block websites/people who use cloud hosting?

... and the award for Most Agressive Webmaster 2012 goes to ... lol

Blocking based on hosting provider does seem a bit harsh, presumably you've had a *lot* of negative activity coming from those specific hosts Biker?

Cheers,
Shaun

Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner!

Every single month, I was getting SSH, POP3, SMTP and FTP attempts from leaseweb and iweb. So the CIDRs for those ISPs went into iptables. I was very explicit in my emails to both providers as well as to why I was blocking them, providing log entries as proof.

Back to my original question...anyone have any experience with cloud services?

Yes.

Great in theory.

I was sold a cloud service a while ago and i was one of the first to adopt it with my old host, was great at the start but as more people signed up to it I found it became slower.

Typically when a host says cloud they mean they've got a couple of servers sitting behind a load balancer in the same rack.

Yeah, I've currently got 2 unmanaged VPS subscriptions (though I'm cancelling one at the end of this billing cycle). I far prefer to have a server that I have complete control of - I can install what I need and I know that any downtime is down to me rather than my host.

I have a VPS, well semi-dedicated server as they call it, it does the job, I dont think I could afford having a dedicated just for fun.