Errrm... So today I decided to investigate the performance issues of my block explorer.
You know how some pages take literally ages to load, eg. the one for the richest address?
Although the poor VPS has only 590MB available RAM (with another 1GB as swap), the bottleneck is actually the CPU...
So I sifted through the bitcoin-abe source code for hours, just to stumble upon this:
http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instance-cpu-steal/TL;DR: FUCK YOU AMAZON!
I have yet to decide whether I'll switch to a bigger instance or ditch amazon altogether. Do you have any good VPS provider recommendations? I tried chunkhost for a bit, but my VPS got restarted several times during a one month period, which is unacceptable. The EC2 instance has not had a single unwanted reboot since I started it, quite impressive.
Sux. Still, as you mentioned it is pretty reliable and it will be hard to find something better in that price range. I've heard a lot of good things about this place lately but never used them so have no clue if good or not.
http://www.dreamhost.com/servers/vps/Try lowendbox, or get a low-end dedicated. Don't want to give specific recommendations, but delimitervps offers (when it's not sold out) Intel Atom servers for just $5/month (quarterly) and freaking dual Xeons (Core 2's I think) for $20/month, which I have one of. Search lowendbox or webhostingtalk for the coupons. Offset it with a bit of CPU mining (don't think you're going to get $20 a month, but it's something.)
Others that I can recommend (mostly unmanaged):
ramhost.us (if they're not sold out)
ramnode
buyvm.net (has great storage servers)
PLEASE don't mine on VPSes (except on-demand instances such as amazon or digitalocean). Recipe to get you kicked from your webhost, and violates every TOS imaginable. With a dedicated, it's yours, so no one cares.