I am an advocate of cloud computing. For over two years, I have used slicehost.com to host a collection of low-traffic websites I have somehow over the years become responsible for. More recently, I've also set it up to run Ruby on Rails so I could learn about that platform.
Slicehost uses Xen virtualization to divide quad-core machines into virtual private servers. My 256 Slice has 256MB of memory, 10GB disk space, and comes with 100GB of data transfer per month, for $20. I can install any of a number of Linux distributions at the touch of a button (I chose Centos).
Slicehost has been dead reliable. As of this writing, I have 544 days of uptime on my slice. Performance is everything I could ask, and the combination of low price and total control has attracted a community of developers who make the Slicehost forum a great place to ask questions about server configuration.
As good as all this is, it still does have a cost. Last week I replaced my Covad 1.5Mbps down/ 384kbps up DSL with Comcast's business-class connection at 22Mbps down / 5Mbps up. It's $30 a month more than the DSL but more than 10 times faster. And the upload speed is finally enough to let me host those low-traffic websites and my training-wheels Rails apps on my own server in the office. So I am coming back out of the cloud.
The server for now is a 600Mhz VIA Eden-powered box running Ubuntu 9.0.4. It is slow, and has only 512MB of RAM (still more than the slice) but it should be good enough for what I am doing, and it uses less than 30 watts. If the speed turns out to be a problem I'll replace it with an Atom or Via Nano platform.
