ihopngo

http://www.gimado.com

I've had good luck testing sites with LoadImpact. Give the free one a try.

But the majority of YC companies close their round, right? It wouldn't make much sense for you to leverage them into a great position, just to have them shot down.

Linode is my favorite provider on the web right now. For us, Linode is the best. It could be overkill for someone else, or a variety of other reasons unrelated to the speed of their hardware. For example, my neighbor only buys stuff from women-owned businesses, no exceptions.

I don't think anyone can be a "hands down winner", because it varies based on the needs of the user. Businesses frequently use Cogent for bandwidth at the lowest price point. Their business model could even depend on it. Other businesses require low latency, service level agreements, etc.

Better is relative. A company like MegaUpload would say Cogent is the best, but a company like Gameservers.com would say Internap.

Eventbrite used scraping in the early days. They first argued it was a publicly available website. "Public" in the sense that the site was browse-able without restriction.

The plaintiff responded that it had anti-scraping language in its user agreement. The court said "the Terms of Use are not displayed on the website in any way in which a reasonable user could be expected to notice them."