Been playing around with the idea for months now to buy some cheap VPS hosting to do my heavy lifting (CPU and I/O intensive tasks) rather than buying a new desktop. As I understand it, VPS is a set amount of resources you can use and cloud is on-demand resources. All I'm really looking to do is to have an empty Linux (or maybe Windows) server to do things like compiling and running some computational programs, as well as hosting a small website maybe.
I can't be the only one here who has played around with the idea, so I'd like to hear who uses what provider and experiences, etc.
The way I see it, if I can get access to a "server" with multiple cores, few gigs of RAM, etc. for under $10-15/month, it's makes much more sense than buying my own hardware. (Obviously, this is the whole basis for cloud computing)