I stay here once a year or so and just wanted to say the service is consistently great, but the prices have gone up very slightly.

I stayed at the Palace Side Hotel for 7 nights and can not recommend this hotel enough. The staff are most helpful and polite. The rooms are small and utilitarian but very clean and efficient. There is a small fridge in the room and TV which gets BBC and CNN. The location is good for walking to many sights in the area and there is a subway station a block away, although most of the time I used a taxi. As another reviewer pointed out, the train station is a bit of a hike and so you should take a taxi from there.
The breakfast buffet is certainly adequate and has both western and (some) Japanese foods. The coffee is strong and hot! The bread is white, as it is in most of Japan and is the only food I wished could have been more like home. I did not have lunch or dinner in the dining room, but many guests seemed to enjoy it. The hotel also has a laundromat with 3 machines and has a common room with a kitchen that can be used for enjoying a snack or drink with friends. An airport shuttle can be ordered to take you to Itami or Kansai airport. It takes about an hour and a quarter to get there. Again, the driver was extremely polite and helpful.

Loved my stay there (breakfast so so).
Tiny room but helpful staff.

Firstly the staff were lovely and helpful and spoke excellent English. However, the main thing to note is that the hotel have a small map on their website and looking at it, it looks like a fairly short walk from the train station. I walked for 40 minutes with a heavy backpack and was only halfway to the hotel, so ended up in a taxi to get the rest of the way, so the map on their website is very misleading as to it's location. Someone on trip advisor said it was a great location but I would strongly disagree. The rooms were ok and served a purpose but its at least a 20 minute walk to the main centre of Kyoto and it's a taxi back if you've had a few drinks.
The mattresses weren't too comfortable either so any back problems, sleep elsewhere.