In reply to Adam.

I really enjoyed my time on Slicehost. The old version of Booko is still there in case anyone reports losing the contents of their lists since the migration ( no reported problems yet). The support people are great - any issues and I'd jump into an online chat and talk to someone. Had few issues. The biggest issue I had was when one of their name resolvers stopped working - it took me ages to figure out why the price grabbers were timing out and led me to write this article as a penance.

Linode has a couple of draws for me though. The one that pushed me over the edge is they dropped their prices to almost half of Slicehost. 512MB host on Slice is $38 / month compared to $19.95 on Linode. Booko's got 2x512 hosts and a 2GB ($130 v $79.95) Web server - so it was a reasonable saving. Second, Linode let you arrange your storage into block devices - so I can use LVM and LVM based snapshots of MySQL for backups. Linode's interface provides more control over your hosts and more functionality in DNS.

When it came time to do the upgrade, it was always going to be to a new set of servers - MySQL dumps are big and slow and I was planning to move to Nginx, - I decided a new set of hosts would be easiest. Whether they're at Slice or Linode didn't make much difference other than transferring database backups - which I did online, without writing out big files with this neat trick: mysqldump --opt -u root -p booko | ssh -C db01.booko.com.au "mysql -u root -p booko"

So, to summarize, both are great, but I've read that Linode has a slight performance advantage and are nearly half the cost.

Cheers,
Dan