Bluelighthost are doing a free 7 day trial (http://www.bluelighthost.com/our-services). It look great so I gave it a spin. 1/2 day later I had Ubuntu, Nginx, MySQL running a WordPress mu. Brilliant! You get a medium VM for £15 ex vat so, after checking my vm would stay alive I signed up. Next day my vm was gone Apparently I didn’t choose an upgrade. They couldn’t restore it and I got passed from pillar to post (the number on the support ticket was iCloud not Bluelighthost). When I eventually got through to Bluelighthost they told me to send an email! They did answer the email quickly but by that time I had restored an image of my server to a home machine and was slightly annoyed. They refunded my money without question.

Conclusion: Probably a good service but some organisational teething problems. Always keep backups and triple check when upgrading that your vps will survive.

I’ve just come to the end of my free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance (see http://aws.amazon.com/free).  After 1 month of paying I’m over $15 for a tiny site with all the OS updating turned off! Imagine what would happen if you got hit by dos.

Conclusion: great service, to difficult to cost and to liable to unexpected bills.