Thank you for your work and persistence Colin! I love using FreeBSD for my servers because of the consistency and great minds behind it. I love it so much that I have written a few posts how to setup a FreeBSD server [1].
Currently there are some other options for hosting your "virtual" FreeBSD server. Some good ones are RootBSD [2] (US), Brightbox [3] (UK) and TransIP [4] (NL). Quality wise that are equally good. I'm currently using TransIP because I'm located in the Netherlands.
Interesting to note is that the above providers make use of KVM virtualization technology. Phoronix did an interesting benchmark comparing Xen, Virtualbox and KVM. It showed that KVM was the winner on compute and disk performance [5]. Would be interesting to find out how FreeBSD performance on Amazon's XEN layer.
Phoronix is infamous for its broken benchmarks. I'm sure the disk performance numbers would look completely different if they used paravirtualized disks (like EC2 does) rather than emulated disks. The compute numbers are just plain weird; on something as cache-resident as ripper it should be impossible for the virtualization system to cause any significant real effect, so I'm sure there's a problem with their benchmark or their test setup somewhere.
Currently there are some other options for hosting your "virtual" FreeBSD server. Some good ones are RootBSD [2] (US), Brightbox [3] (UK) and TransIP [4] (NL). Quality wise that are equally good. I'm currently using TransIP because I'm located in the Netherlands.
Interesting to note is that the above providers make use of KVM virtualization technology. Phoronix did an interesting benchmark comparing Xen, Virtualbox and KVM. It showed that KVM was the winner on compute and disk performance [5]. Would be interesting to find out how FreeBSD performance on Amazon's XEN layer.
[1] https://www.wunki.org/ [2] https://www.rootbsd.net/ [3] http://brightbox.com/ [4] https://www.transip.nl/ [5] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubunt...