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This company provides serious virtualized (via user mode linux) dedicated servers. This means that they can provide the feel of a dedicated system— full customizability, root access, isolated hardware environment— without having to actually dedicate a real machine to each user. Hence, it is a lot cheaper than the alteratives: $10 setup + $20 monthly for a basic setup, compared to $150 setup + $100 or more monthly.

If frassle grows to the point that I want it hosted somewhere other than my PC, I'll definitely look into these guys. From my perspective, my only gripe is that while they give more disk space and bandwidth than I'll likely need, they are stingy with RAM. A 32MB RAM upgrade costs $10, which is as much as the jump from their basic 64MB system to the 96MB one— except switching plans rather than simply adding to your existing plan also gets you more CPU, disk, and bandwidth. Frassle, like many web apps, is mostly about RAM: there isn't that much data, but it's hella-faster if it's cached in RAM rather than on disk. Plus since it's written in mod_perl on (pre-forking) Apache 1.2, the web server hogs lots and lots of RAM. Maybe if I move to Linode hosting it'll be worth switching to Apache 2.0, which has a much more efficient threading model.