VPS Hosting

[while1]

Well, after I failed to secure a job offer from any of my top 4... I'll be attempting to stop sucking and become awesome instead over the next six months or so.  One of the many goals I have set for myself is to setup a blog and start posting to it regularly, as well as play around with different web technologies (i.e. Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, etc.).

Back when I was in college I had shared web hosting but now I want more control administering the server my blog will be running on (administration of blog's database and what not).  I'm pretty cheap so I don't want to pay a lot of money for a VPS, and I don't imagine I'll be getting a lot of traffic to my blog, so I don't think I should need to pay $20+/mo for a VPS.  Anyone have recommendations on quality, reliable inexpensive VPS hosting services?

I'm thinking OpenVZ should be fine for what I need it for, but I'm open to considering Xen based solutions... anyone have a preference?

In terms of OS, I'm leaning towards CentOS 5/6 (other options seem to be Debian 6 and Ubuntu 10.04/10.10/11.10)... but really it doesn't matter that much to me.  I'm familiar with both RPM and Debian based distributions for the most part.

What I'm not sure about is how much RAM I will need or possibly need.  I'm not sure if 128MB will suffice or if I need to pay for 256 or even 512.

I've done some research on VPS hosting, but I know that some people here like Sidoh have a lot more experience with such, so any advice or tips would be appreciated.

[Sidoh]

I host my medium-volume website (~20-100K impressions/day) on a VPS. It's 4.0 GHz cpu/1GB RAM/40 GB storage/800 GB bandwidth/2 IP addresses for around $21/month. If you buy 12 months at a time you get a 15% discount and it works out to closer to $17/month

That's their "Gold" package - I got it because my traffic comes in surges and I was having reliability problems with shared hosting. Their Bronze package might be all you need, though. It's still 512 MB RAM and 20 GB storage for $13/month.

When I was looking for a VPS, I spent a few days looking for the best deal I could find, and this was it. I've been with them for nearly two years now. :)

Here's a link: https://vpsnoc.com/clients/aff.php?aff=093 (shamelessly included my affiliate link, as you can see).