As mentioned in thatlinuxbox.com now runs on a Linode, I switched from A2 Hosting to Linode a few weeks ago. The new Linode server is running great so today I canceled my A2 Hosting account.

I ditched A2 Hosting because the low apache MaxClients settings meant my sites were giving 503 errors and when pages did load ok they were generally missing images.

Beware so-called "Unlimited" shared web hosting plans. They are cheap for a reason. The MaxClients setting makes an effective bottleneck to limit site traffic and usage. When I asked A2 Hosting about this problem they suggested that I upgrade to one of their own VPS hosing packages. Um, no thanks. I switched providers instead.

It seems like there is an un-tapped niche in there somewhere. My Linode 360 costs $20 / month. I was paying $6 / month for the A2 Executive Web Hosting Plan. I would have loved to pay $12 for shared hosting that did not suck.

However, now that I'm on a Linode VPS plan I am probably hooked... it is really darn convenient to have my irssi client logged into IRC all the time and available to me anywhere I can get an SSH shell.