Slush, forgive me for speaking out of line here but isn't it about time you invested in some real dedicated machines for your pool and not cheap VPS solutions?
This is of course valid question. I'm Linode customer for many years and I have so far great experience with them. I don't think it is 'cheap VPS solution', it is just 'VPS solution'. Problems happen everywhere, for example one my real rack server catched up by fire before few months. 'real == better' isn't valid in every situation.
VPS is very good solution for application like pool, because I can scale it as I wish. Pool went from single server with 512MB RAM (on 16. December) to many server infrastructure with standalone database, balancer with possible IP failover, many backends where I can disconnect any of them without pool outage and so on. Everything that with 15 minute planned outage because of database migration. In case of rising demand, I can make pool infrastructure 10x stronger by few clicks. This is not possible with real servers.
I hope that we'll find reason for those issues, and I'm really sorry for it; we're trying to do the best. But if we won't find any trouble, I'm of course ready to migrate to another provider to give best possible pool experience.
Slush have you considered switching to a provider such as Rackspace or Softlayer? I do believer they have a cloud hosting solution which may be perfect for the pool - you can scale the amount of server hardware you need.
Another provider to consider may be iWeb. They're Canadian based, but when I had a dedicated server with them I found them to have a very reliable network. As far as I know they have cloud type of solution now too.
Maybe you can even convince some of these provider to accept payment in bitcoins!
That would be super cool.
