I think when you really think about this review as a whole the reason Linode make it work the money is not that they use beading edge CPU’s, the greatest disk arrays, or even run the worlds fastest network it is that the quality of the ‘service’ is through the roof.

They have unique services, top level support staff, and a great reputation. I know 5520′s are not top of the line but let us be honest if you are using a VPS you don’t need dedicated hardware to begin with and you are unlikely to even use even 20% of a 5520 at any given time and if you really do need that you should not be using a VPS.

I think Linode just have things right.. they know what actually works and they know how to do things right and they know how to make sure you have everything you need from the 1st second with them.

As a VPS host this really makes me think hard about things, is the highest unixbench score important or would my efforts be better spent in developing service features and quality while providing a fair amount of performance.

My own reviews of Inception Hosting that you have done in the past blow the raw numbers out of the water, but can you really feel the difference between a 2000 and 1600 unixBench score as an end user? probably not, and can the avg user hitting your site tell the difference… almost certainly not.

Very interesting stuff, glad you did this.

To answer your inquiry about our brand name, these terms “Hawk” and “Ninja” goes really hosting business and I believe both of you can tell that . Our motto was to do something little bit different than other provider an bring in a fresh non corporate personal feeling with our service and this is where our wording and our brand image helps us.

While I am personally not proud of our 100mb/s+ throughput results, I can assure you that these are constant and that is the lowest I have seen on our full node (You can verify my claim through serverbear http://serverbear.com/9788/ninjahawk) and that is expected from non cached 4disk raid 10 arrays. There are always room for improvements and we are constantly improving. Our newest nodes will feature a bigger raid 10 array of 8-12 drives.

Feel free to ask me any question here and I will do my level best to answer them.

Once again, thank you very much for your honest feedback, it really helps when you pinpoint our negative and positive sides. It really helps us to set our target higher