I had a VPS at Hetzner I replaced my Linode with. Really liked it. For the same price, though, you can get a really underpowered dedicated server at kimsufi.ie through OVH with more ram and HD space.
Both Hetzner and Kimsufi offer dedicated servers which are really in the same scale. The 49€ server, which is the top of the Kimsufi line and the bottom of the Hetzner line, are virtually the same server except one has 2To disk and 24G RAM, while the other has 2x3To (RAID1) and 16Go.
I have the 14.99€ server as a development box that I access from the states. Truth be told, the disk IO and processing speed is slower than a Linode 512, but for 2GB of ram, 1TB of HDD and the transfer you can't really beat it.
I called Ireland once to immediately validate my account and they seemed friendly enough. OVH supports Kimsufi boxes. The dedicated server has been up without issues since I bought it. The server is hosted somewhere in Northern France near London as far as I can tell.
The only complaint I have about it are that the relay they have between France and the US is nearly always congested during US prime time. Because of this, download speeds from my server are really slow around 8PM est. Otherwise it's great.
tl;dr
Development box and not in EU? Do it! Production box and not in EU? Maybe go with Hetzner or someone domestic.
I've been having trouble with my existing UK dedicated server provider of late and am looking to move. I could get a lot more bang for my buck with OVH/kimsufi, but wouldn't want to move if they were more unreliable than what I have now.
Well; I hear that people have different experiences with them (some people here on HN had 0 problems with them); I have been with them for around 8 years and I've had up to 50 servers there of different specs; from kimsufi type to the very large storage machines (http://www.ovh.nl/dedicated_servers/hg_2011_xxl.xml). For us we have the following issues: a) the raid degrades; on EVERY SINGLE MACHINE; we have, per machine, 1 degrade every month, meaning that for 2-3 days of the month the machine is unusable. We asked support; they have no clue as to the why and they always fix it, but it takes 2-3 days because everything will be very slow while it's resynching. b) we have rather a lot of network issues; the network just disappears for minutes to an hour. Now the other people on HN might not notice all of this as they have no (or no good) monitoring and they don't check their sites often enough; generally, for a blog or whatever you won't notice the downtime; if your server is not busy you won't notice the resync and if you don't have monitoring odds are you won't notice that ~1 hour / month network issue. But we really hammer hard (there were 2 very popular sites hosted on a cluster of them) on our servers and they were serving millions of hits/day. People notice then that suddenly the ENTIRE cluster is gone for a time. And when a machine doing 100s of hits/sec and goes into resync, you'll notice. So we are only running analytics there. And for the price/power it's a really good deal; hard to beat.
Also; they are HUGE and growing fast. When I started with them in 2005, they would ONLY speak french, you could not ask for support in another language, you could not pay in another way than the french bank and so forth. And machines + network would be down often. They improved a lot, so my guess is they will improve more over time, but they are a monster in hosting land.
