There are _a lot_ of dedicated options. In terms of price, Softlayer's at the high end. If Softlayer gives you a price/performace improvement over AWS of 2.5x, you can get another 2-3x that by picking a cheap (but not necessarily bad!) provider.
On the cheap end, you're looking at OVH and Hetzner. They've both been reliable for me, but I still wouldn't run anything mission critical on them (from anecdotes). Hetzner is Europe only, while OVH does have a DC in Quebec. If you're already using spot instances, which can vanish pretty quickly, you might have the code in place to handle these potentially flaky providers.
Over the years, I've had good experience with WebNX which has good connectivity to Asia. They've been supposed to open a NY location for a while now...Speaking of NY, there's reliablesite.net which is ok. You have Hivelocity in Florida (which I didn't use specifically for South America, but I imagine they'd be good for that).
There's a handful of companies which I've never used but that I've been hearing good things about for years. NetDepot, SingleHop and LimeLight Networks for example.
I have used 100TB in both Singapore and Washington. They are a Softlayer reseller. The extra level of indirection sucks when something goes bad, but they are much cheaper (what you can get from 100TB for $400 might cost $1200 at Softlayer). A few of the locations they actually have staff at, so I imagine that's much better.
I recommend you spend some time on webhostingtalk.com. It's great. There's a forum specifically for deals which can be useful to pick something up.
For anyone who's only familiar with AWS/clouds: most of these take 1-2 days to set up machines, their control panels are horrible, they don't have an API and you might not even get a dedicated KVM switch.
Wow, I feel like a huge advertising billboard this morning!
Hi.
Do you know why the above "cheap" services do not user something like OpenStack to bundle their services?
This would supposedly provide them at least with some dashboards and API's.
thanks.
Many of these are older than OpenStack by a wide margin. OVH in particular is huge, they own many data centers, thousands of employees...you just don't make that sort of switch overnight. The cost and risk might not be justifiable.
