Linode is cheaper than many of the other big names in VPS and they offer plenty of storage and bandwidth too. Monitoring their status page for a few days/weeks should give you a good idea of the kind of downtime you’ll be looking at.

The Category 5e standard guarantees performance of attenuation, return loss, propagation delay, delay skew, NEXT, Power-sum NEXT, ACR, power-sum ACR, ELFEXT, and power-sum ELFEXT to a nominal range of values at 100 MHz. The Category 6 standard guarantees to 250mhz. Cat6 is more expensive and doesn’t get you any improvement right now unless you’re running 10Gbase-T hardware. Cat5e are easy to make. Just get a spool, a crimper tool, and some rj45 jacks. If money isn’t a factor, run cat6 or fiber, and run multiple cables at a time. Get fancy punch down terminals and build a wiring closet with fancy lighting. And pay a high end home theater company to do it all for you.

If you want to get an estimate of bandwidth speeds between two machines, but you don’t want to factor in storage read/write speeds, iperf is the perfect tool.

The oneliner ob_gzhandler only works for Apache and you have to have the mod_gzip module loaded. This method is crap. So to send gzipped PHP output to users browser’s to save bandwidth, try this. It also helps for slow Internet connections and large pages too.