VPS.net Review

Sep 29, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Hosting 55 Comments

I signed up for an account with VPS.net at the beginning of September, installed Ubuntu, and I’ve been slowly migrating my various websites over since.

What exactly is VPS.net? They are a provider of Cloud Virtual Private Servers. You can affordably purchase as much hosting firepower as you need, and have full control over the management of it. VPS.net isn’t like other providers though. Their unique “cloud” twist makes things a bit more interesting…

VPS.net Header

What makes VPS.net different from other services? Instead of simply partitioning a physical server into slices and selling them as virtual servers, VPS.net has what they call a “Virtual Private Server Cloud.” They break their infrastructure into “nodes,” which are blocks of resources (256MB of RAM, 10GB storage, 250GB transfer, and a certain CPU share) that you can pool together in various ways to create custom virtual machines.

Suppose you need a server with 512MB of RAM, 20GB of storage, and 500GB of monthly data transfer. Just order two nodes, create a new virtual machine, and assign the nodes to it. Press the switch to boot it up, and then you can choose one of the many OS images to install. (Ubuntu, CentOS, Gentoo, Debian and Turnkey Linux are are distros available at the present.)

What if you’re experiencing unusually high traffic? Just add another node and assign it to your virtual machine. It will reboot gain access to the new resources. (You can even purchase “temporary” nodes on a $1/day basis, which work great for handling short-term traffic spikes, or creating a temporary development test server.) I really like this concept. It’s very nice to be able to pay for the resources you need when you need them, instead of being stuck upgrading from a $50/month plan to a $100/month plan with a traditional VPS.

VPS.net Node Slider

The service has seemed stable thus far, and customer support is truly awesome. I’ve rarely seen management so actively involved with their customer community. If I had a pre-sales question, all I had to do was send a quick message on Twitter. Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of the UK2 Group, which is the parent company of VPS.net, participates actively in the VPS.net community forum, along with the rest of the people at the hosting provider.

The servers are speedy, though your mileage will depend on your skills at configuring Linux servers.

I would definitely recommend VPS.net to anyone who has outgrown shared hosting. Between their flexible resource node model and their customer service, they’re definitely worth considering.

Affiliate link: VPS.net.

  • SteveW

    I would love to say I would try this innovative idea and see just how good it can be…

    BUT… the fact it is linked with, and is part of UK2 Group just tells me to stay the hell away from it.
    Sure this is a completely different product, but the customer service is still UK2 and quite frankly in the hosting industry they are hands down the worst I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with.
    More downtime on email than anything I have seen, and a total disregard for actually looking after customers in a nice friendly manner.

    So, thanks for the review and I really am tempted to try this myself, but sadly UK2 are just too damn poor at just about everything for me to be tempted enough.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/redwall_hp redwall_hp

      Which UK2 Group service did you have problems with? I've yet to hear anybody complain about bad customer service with VPS.net or 10tb.com, though I've run into some people occasionally with bad experiences with some of their other (older) properties. Don't forget that your bad experience isn't necessarily representative of the company. (There's always a no-so-great support rep, or some other problem that doesn't necessarily occur for everyone.)

  • http://twitter.com/ditlev @ditlev

    Thanks for your input Steve . UK2Group runs a whole range of services and brands, and just like most airlines has a first, business and a 'tourist' class – we run web hosting companies catering clients looking for almost free hosting (http://www.another.com) to very highend hosting (http://www.vi.net – currently hosting the Home Office, NHS and other prominent services).

    Now, that being said, the service of UK2 has improved significant. I took the step to in source all support recently (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/29/uk2_chang… closing down my Indian and Ukrainian offices, and we've hired more than 40 people the last year to cater for the mass market support setup.
    UK2 still has some way to go before being fully transformed into the company I'd like it to be, but we are doing very well – and our client satisfaction studies shows significant improvements.

    VPS.NET is a totally different setup though, the management of it has nothing to do with the Level1-2 support team of UK2 or any other of our mass market companies. It is a highly customized and very flexible platform that we've invested heavily into the last year – and it is currently our fastest growing entity. We have only been out of beta for a few months, but have deployed more than 8500 servers, and we have a long list of positive reviews posted by clients like Matt here on webmaster-source.com…

    I'd be happy to discuss this – or anything else – and invite you to contact me directly: ditlev@uk2group.com, if you want more details on what changes we've gone through the last few years. Also, if you'd like a demo of VPS.NET, send me an email and I'll arrange it :)

    Best,

    Ditlev Bredahl
    CEO, UK2Group.com

    • http://twitter.com/ditlev @ditlev

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/29/uk2_chang… – seems the link to TheReg was formatted wrong in my post above…

    • SteveW

      Thanks for the update Ditlev, it does help me to appreciate the improvements you're implementing for the advantage of customers.

      One thing I will say impresses me about UK2Group is your hands-on approach as CEO.
      I follow you on Twitter so I am well aware of your passion for the industry and keeping customers happy, and comments like this directly from you does convince me that my impressions of UK2 could change.

      We will be looking to change our server setup in the next couple of months, and based on your convincing argument, I may well opt for VPS.net at least on a testing basis and see if this is for us.
      If it is not, then we can part based on another experience. I hope however I can be proved wrong! :)

      Lastly, as a Silver-Tongued CEO I believe you are a rare commodity in this world and I believe many business leaders could learn a thing or two from you.
      I am a hard man to convince 'most' of the time, but you always impress me with your style of communication, so I wish you all the success in your venture/s.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/redwall_hp redwall_hp

      Thanks for taking the time to comment and clear that up, Ditlev. And Steve, good luck with your possible VPS.net trial. :)

  • http://www.cannybill.com/ Wladimir

    And dont forget, you also get a FREE http://www.cannybill.com account which enables you to re-sell VPS.NET to your customers:

    http://vps.net/blog/2009/08/11/cannybill-integrat…

  • http://www.rodmacbeth.com Rod MAcbeth

    I'm not at the stage yet of needing a service like this but I'll be bookmarking this post for future reference.

    It sounds like a super concept.

    Cheers,
    Rod

  • sherry1234

    We will be looking to change our server setup in the next couple of months, and based on your convincing argument, I may well opt for VPS.net at least on a testing basis and see if this is for us.If it is not, then we can part based on another experience. I hope however I can be proved wrong.now leaving for my music songs classes so c u later.

  • Best Windows VPS

    We've been using UK2.net for a couple of years now for running Windows VPS and have been very happy.

    • http://vps.net Ditlev

      hehe – nice way to add (read: spam) incoming links to your hosting company. UK2 does not even sell windows VPS's.

  • zoyapets

    vps.net suck, their customer service is non-existing, ISPmanager is very poor, has lousy documentation, stay away!!!!!!!

    • james

      VPS has no customer service and our website is down almost daily. never do they respond to complaints or deal with the issues. Would not use the company again on the basis of how they deal with our site.

  • Carlos

    zoyapets

    ISPmanager is not a vps.net product, but it's a good product, and it's used by thousands of users worldwide very successfully, they also have very good documentation.

    I will assume you where unable to setup your system, I'd be interested to know more of why, you can contact me at carlos_at_uk2group.com

  • zoyapets

    I know ISPmanager is not a vps.net product, am not an idiot, but you have chosen it, and it really does suck.
    I can’t edit htaccess file, get unsupported coding error, this is ridiculous.
    Also it’s funny you people are so fast at responding here, how about having some proper support when you get mail instead, but I guess you don’t have time for that, you are here all the time……..

  • Carlos

    zoyapets

    We also offer cPanel, and you free to bring your own

  • zoyapets

    I would prefer Cpanel, how do I install that, and is it free?
    If not then I’m done with you.
    ISPmanager is a selling point and it SUCKS.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/redwall_hp redwall_hp

      cPanel is used by a lot of shared hosting providers, and it's not free. Hosts that offer it have to pay for it in order to offer it to their customers. If you want to install it on a VPS, you can, but you would have to purchase a license for it yourself.

      Personally, I don't use a control panel, either cPanel or ISPmanager, at all. They're unnecessary and they use up valuable system resources. Learn to use the command line and you'll be able to do things much more efficiently, without depending on a certain graphical interface.

  • Carlos

    cPanel is $10 /mo

  • zoyapets

    ISPmanager is not free either, they have paid to let their customers use it and some hosting companies pay to let customers use Cpanel, vps.net made the wrong choice.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/redwall_hp redwall_hp

      I didn't say ISPmanager was free, I merely stated that cPanel wasn't. (I haven't compared the prices in awhile, but cPanel might be more expensive?) Yes, *shared* hosting companies pay to let their customers use cPanel. However, VPS.net is primarily for people who know how to configure servers for themselves, of which most have no need for control panel software. Most VPS providers (including Linode and Slicehost) do not include cPanel with their servers either. That doesn't mean you can't pay for a license and install it for yourself though.

  • http://www.vps.net Ditlev

    Yeah, I prefer cPanel as well. I like ISPmanager too though – and the reason we went with ISPmanager for VPS.NET was because it has a very low resource footprint. CPanel has a hard time running with less than 512mb ram – you CAN put in on 256, but there wouldn't be much room left for your websites/applications. Now, ISPmanager only uses like 60-64mb and runs perfectly on 256mb (one VPS.NET node) with a bunch of busy sites on it.
    So, yeah – I love cPanel, but in this case ISPmanager was the better choice.

    :)
    D

  • Fito

    As a new arrival and certified noob from one of their newly purchased US companies where they have marketed the hell out of this whole Cloud thing I have to say their tech support and general readiness to deal with the massive wave of mid-level developers looking to move to the Cloud is NONE. ZERO. ZIP. NADA.

    a) Right off the bat: Their entire support is based on….a forum. Kid you not. Sticky notes and let the People Help the People. Their Wiki is 8 pages, one entry per page. If you develop Drupal you are used to the painful process by which sometimes you need to extract information from their site, but…it is open source, a free thing. For $40 minimun a month you now have to basically do the same thing: Search -hopefully for the right terms and with words more than three letters-, differentiate between what an instruction and an opinion is, shift through posts, etc, etc. And just to add to the frustration, they keep the forum and their accounts separately…

    b) They market their products to the intermediate vps-type developer, but then their tech support basically tells you: “No Linux? Learn. Bye, Bye mate” They have no guides, no manuals, nothing other than some basic VPS set up routines and a few other items. They are about as ready to deal with these type of clients as a hippy is to sign up for the army. There are not even basic explanations of what is what for the less-informed.

    c) Tech-heads run the show. I have been doing this since 1995, I can tell. I would guess this company is made of corporate and lots of techs, but little in customer development. I UNDERSTAND that perhaps they do have to thin the herd a bit and set a “bottom line” as who they want their customers to be and who they prefer remains in shared-vps-semi universe. (after all, there is a formula by which selling to higher trained customers saves money in tech suport operations) But even with that into account, you can see in the way they answer in the forums, the way they address customers (“you guys?” “mate?” Who are you? my freshman year roommate at college?) I don’t know, maybe it is a British thing…

    Now it is always easy to dish out criticism without giving any suggestions or providing some constructive ideas. That, however is something one saves for friends and family. This is business and in business either you LISTEN and ACT or you get stucked with the shitty company name and the poor impression for the rest of your corporate life.

    PS: Do keep in mind I had almost zero interaction with their reps other than reading their responses in the forums and using their client account. All and all, not a very positive experience.

    • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

      I suppose I’m what you might call a “tech head,” but when I signed up I didn’t have any server experience, and only a little Linux experience. It only took me some Google searches and a couple of books to get going.

      VPS plans, no matter the provider, will have a learning curve. I don’t think it’s fair to take them to task for that, especially when most of their users so far are “tech heads.” They do need more guides though, you’re definitely right about that.

      Anyway, they’re fairly new. I hope they will improve with time.

    • Ray

      My experience was similar to everything you just said. Props for hitting the nose. I was going to write a comment, but now I don’t have to. Thanks.

  • Hussein Huwaidi

    I’ve used this service for a one day ($1/day!!) experiment and it was PERFECT. they gave me root on an empty machine (Ubuntu 8.04 x64) and I did all my tests on it (I even upgraded the Kernal of this node!!!)

    Internet speed is decent ~ 1024 KBps.

    It was a good place to be in :)

  • sharyf

    At first I thought VPS.NET was the right choice; good speed, fexibility, technology, data centre etc. But not for too long. I configured a private DNS server in their space and it did not work, contacted the support and still didnt get to work. I wanted my DNS sever like
    ns1.domain.com
    ns2.domain.com
    After lot of days of passing multiple messages every day, they said I have to enter IP address also. When I enter IP address through the domain register it basically fowards to the IP, so this is nothing fixed by VPS.NET

    Hope this helps other host seekers. Now I’m looking for moving out.

  • http://megashot.net Smitry Kieeev

    Anyone who had good experience with VPS.net, has got to be a very lucky person. Please, please, please, do yourself a favor and stay away from these people. reliability is non existent and Customer support is meaningless here. just this month,our site was down for 8 days, YES, 8 days and now, today, the site has been down for 5 hours already and they are telling me they will get it fixed in the “next couple of hours” :(
    “supreme Support”, is nothing more than a joke and it can take up to an hour just to gt a reply on a Critical ticket. Don’t buy into their “5 minute response time” it is just not gonna happen.
    Their customer support is another sad story. Listen to this,,, they do not even queue calls and you could be calling and calling ans calling and they keep on telling you to call back again as there is no one available to help.
    Stay away guys, These people could make your life miserable and ruin your business :(

    • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

      I don’t think it’s as uncommon as you think to have good experiences with VPS.net. Aside from a DDoS attack and a power outage that caused complications, I haven’t had any downtimes that weren’t a result of my lack of experience with server administration.

      If you know how to administer a server, I highly doubt it should be a problem. Joost de Valk doesn’t have issues with them, and Cats Who Code has been running on the same datacenter as I for a couple of weeks now.

  • http://www.hydronika.com Robert Donnell

    Signed up – I made an error an selected the wrong number of nodes. No way to progress without intercession from billing… oh, they are closed over the weekend. So, nothing for 48 hours!

    So much for high-speed deployment – they also don’t tell you they are closed???

    Disappointing to say the least!

  • Russell T

    Horrible company. After dealing for years with server burnups and 2 total destructions of my site by Midphase I was told to move to vps.net. (at first I didn’t even know it was the same company) 3 months went by after inital horrible problems in migration. I had high hopes they were different (despite being the same company), they are not. Support is horrible to say the least, as many have said, if you aren’t a nasa engineer just too lazy to run you own server from home, you can forget help from them. You’ll get 5 different front end support people who’ll do 5 different “Solutions” on your site and still leave you down. Just like Midphase, if they mess up something (hardware failures abound, glitches, misconfigurations, ect) they will blame you, admit they havent’t a clue, and tell you to go to PAID support. Yes, paid support just to find out what went wrong when you yourself never changed a thing or touched a thing. If you have a single bit of self survival instanct, avoid vps.net and all their services (The UK2 group) like the plauge. Unless of course you enjoy headaches, anger, frustration, and even a good bit of smarmy abuse.

    • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

      It sounds like you’re comparing apples to oranges here. Midphase aims their services at a different niche than those seeking a VPS. It’s standard, from any company, to expect the customer to manage their VPS without help, unless you’re looking for a “managed” plan, which is essentially what VPS.net’s paid support it.

      Yes, it takes specialized knowledge to run an unmanageable VPS. If you aren’t a “nasa engineer,” you should be looking for a managed VPS, rather than a do-it-yourself service.

      • Russell T

        Wrong, up until VERY recently Midphase had (And probably still does, unless they’ve managed to get all their VPS clients moved by now) a total vps package, a very good one actually if only the techs behind it could keep their servers from burning up and crashing like wingless planes every other week. They did indeed begin pushing all VPS customers out (Shunting them to VPS.net actually) to concentrate on the simpler and less responsibility required “niche” of small simple shared server websites. I do agree with you though that IF a client wishes to do anything but HOST/PARK a finished and virtually unchanging website (Aside from simple databse manuipulation of accounts…say a static game for instance) then yes, they should learn what is required to accomodate their actions and activities. However that is not the total market, there are many people who use VPS servers to host bigger websites or games that require more space and power for a database but do not know how/nor need to know the finer points of in depth ITTech because those sites are unchanging (Code,settings, configurations, ect). BUT in conclusion, that was not the point of my review, REGARDLESS of the knowledge of the client, when changes, actions or issues on the servers end cause problems within a client’s site it should be the responsibility of the HOST to address, investigate and problem solve said issues and deliver to the client an honest, understandable and workable solution. VPS.net (UK2 group in general) have the horrible habit of sticking to the UNETHICAL ideal that “unmanaged” means “we have no responsibility what-so-ever, even if it is our issues that cause a problem.” They will and have ignored, shunted, passed the buck, side-stepped and flat out lied on more than one occasion and I’m just 1 client, who was with midphase for 6 years!…a google search can find you a whole lot more. They spend more time training their front line support on how best to shunt clients to paid support and how to side-step support questions than they do on the ins and outs of their own service and actual ITTech knowledge. But you’re right, if a client wants to manipulate their vps they should know what they are doing OR pay for someone to do it for them. But that does not mean “We have no responsibilities here” and yet THAT is the actual mantra of VPS.net in my experience and many many others.

        • Buster

          The proof UK2 sucks: I am a member of West Host for many years. Truly and hands down THE best hosting company ever. Never had an issue that did not get solved, never ONCE had a major event go down with them.

          Enters UK2.

          First, they pull the same “move to the Cloud. VPS is done.” Everybody freaks hard enough that they get a bit scared and back off “allowing” current VPS set ups to stay put but that is it.

          Then….BAM. A MAJOR data center screw up, servers in some accounts gone for two days.

          I knew it the moment I got the letter from West Host this was bad, bad, bad news…My fears were confirmed further by the fact the company used the EXACT same excuse that VPS.net used when THEY had they major melt down last year: It wasn’t us, it was a fire in the data center.

          Wow. You ought put some extinguishers in there Don’t ya think? Because that is TWO major fires in one year.

          ——

          This outfit is NOT ready for prime time. Regardless of whether you know or not know enough about Linux the fact remains: Their set up is fragile. Period. They keep “adding” features and this and that, but their cloud is more like a fog…no quite a cloud yet and very confusing. And they do themselves no favors by ignoring the criticism, but the fact is their shinny new toy sort feels juts like that…a very nice, very cool, very neat toy, but not a real tool….

          If you are running a “flake-site” (another file sharing site, another whatever-blog advertising network, another millionth whatever-Tube clone, etc, etc) then this is cheap useful web service. By this I mean if eventually crashing, eventually loosing stuff or having so-so service matters not.

          If you are running a corporate-level or a robust branded site – or even more importantly, if you are reselling or hosting the clients yourself- you do yourself a great diservice by using these guys and your putting yourself at risk of getting sued or worst. REMEMBER that once you take on to your client’s hosting YOU become responsable for them and they cannot take legal action against VPS.net, they take legal action against you REGARDLESS of whether it was the fault of VPS.net or not. So think twice before you get in bed with these guys OR MANY of the others just like them.

          Personally, I am sticking to Amazon for now. More complicated and certainly more corporate and not as much of a friendly “door room” vibe that these guys have, but in the long run safer and a hell of a lot more stable.

  • http://www.catswhocode.com Jean-Baptiste Jung

    I had some problems at first with VPS.net but the staff helped me very quickly. They’re not perfect but they answer your emails in less than 10 minutes, which is great and quite rare.

    They also gave me a free month of hosting to apologize for several hours downtime.

    In my opinion, it’s not bad results at all, not to mention that their server are very fast.

  • http://www.discutonshebergementweb.net Dawnson

    Just feel like they are still in beta stage after 1 year of live service:

    1) lacks of documentation
    2) remove image/template without announcement
    3) failled backup system
    4) incompetent support
    5) hardware failure

    You can simply not rely on their uptime, if you website require reliable uptime do not use VPS.net.

    Simply notice that some part of their forums are private, guess what, lots of issue are posted there.

  • http://p5marketing.com/ Robert Donnell

    I disagree with the negative comments posted by Dawnson.

    there is no lack of documentations (or lacks) :)
    they have great support
    very satisfied user.

  • Dawnson
  • Dawnson
  • Claude

    I made the mistake of not reading who the people behind VPS.net were and eagerly ordered a few nodes yesterday. Then the paypal invoice showed it came from midphase.com, a host with which I had parted ways due to general incompetence (it’s been covered in previous comments already), from billing to tech support.

    Even though it’s the weekend, I expected those little robots that show up all over their site to setup my account within minutes (even hours) so I could start playing. Instead I get a web site notice that they’re off during the weekend and things like this have to wait until humans get involved…

    MidPhase.com + Excuses = disaster. Stay away from these people.

    • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

      They’re not Midphase, they’re another group owned by the parent company that bought Midphase.

      Sorry you had a bad experience, but I would say you are probably one of the unfortunate exceptions. Most customers seem happy with VPS.net, as I am. WordPress plugin developer Joost de Valk is very happy with the service, for instance.

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    Out of curiosity, why are so many users with negative reviews to leave landing on this page in the first place? It strikes me as unusual for so many people with bad experiences to be searching for reviews of the company. “vps.net review” is the most common incoming search keyword to this page.

    Anyone want to shed some light on this?

  • notgood

    >> Anyone want to shed some light on this?

    Perhaps people feel they have been let down and decide to research vps.net after they purchase (when they should have researched before).

    I purchased, expected instant provisioning – got severely delayed provisioning and also then found out about charges not detailed on their public site.

    Not made use of the service and have been promised a refund, though the admin who promised it has gone awful quiet since….. :(

  • http://www.matshoof.com hakem

    Hello,

    Some of people here doesn’t know what does “vps” means so it’s better to search before reading ..

    Vps.net is a very nice company in my opinion , I’m on the Atlanta cloud and haven’t got any downtime ..

    Another thing is the ability to recreate the vps , or re-install it , also nick is doing a great job there , when I have any problems even in holidays he responds to me , thanks nick ..

    And also on this post there is someone who is just advertising his site ..

    Also the daily nodes are awesome , it’s better to try it again hehe or for people who have bad experience you must try the bad hosts to know the good ones ..

    thanks :D

  • http://CommunityColor.com Kevin Delaney

    “Out of curiosity, why are so many users with negative reviews to leave landing on this page in the first place?”

    The UK2 Group went on a buying spree and bought up several companies of differing reputation. Such buying sprees result in personnel changes. My guess is that people are wondering how this will affect the services.

    The UK2 Group might well be merging and ending a few brands.

    To make matters worse, in February 2010, the fire suppression system went off in data center in Providence, Utah (at least this is what they say happened.) In June 2010, the company claims to be moving servers from Providence to Lindon, Utah.

    I went multiple years without down time with Westhost. This year, I’ve been having problems; So, my guess is the negative reviews are from people who are trying to figure out how to deal with the corporate changes.

  • http://www.mobileapps4all.net almario

    hi,

    it’s really tempting to get an account with vps.net especially now that godaddy’s service and servers are going south. my VPS with godaddy freuently goes down. my other site hosted with them went down for 6 hours today. everyday, the site goes down 2-3 times even without high traffic (regular pageviews, that is). it has become a dilemma for me so i’m moving to vps.net this coming month.

  • DH

    When you make your decision keep in mind they have no refunds or trial period. So if you purchase a service and don’t like it, they keep your money if you cancel.

    I tried VPS.NET as on option for hosting web sites for clients but wasn’t very pleased at the beginning. The signup form defaulted to adding backup service at an additional charge. I unchecked it. When I submitted the form, I missed a field and the form returned with red text under the backup service and rechecking it after I already unchecked it. It seems they don’t want to honor your selection and trick you into purchasing it.

    I paid with a company visa but my account was put on hold. I submitted a support ticket after two hours of no change, to ask about it. They enabled the account. Then I setup the server and tried to start it. The panel displayed waiting on task. I waited four hours and it still said waiting on task. I submitted a ticket again.

    After so may problems in less than 24 hours, I decided to cancel. They informed me they have a policy of no refunds. So if you plan on trying them out, start with a cheap service then upgrade if you like it.

  • Joseph M

    I have been using vps.net for more than a month, and honestly, I like the service. I started moving all my websites to vps.net and customer service is good comparing with other customer services. Response time is less than half day so it is very good customer service.

    Downtime! I experienced it once only and it took around 2 hours and didnt experience anything since.

    I like vps.net and specially customer service, and their reponse time! and also there help.

    No complains here at all :-)

  • http://egasonline.biz lotfi

    After 3 weeks, I learned how well they perfected shortening their responses to every support ticket I submitted.
    Better not ask more than one question per ticket, their techs wont read more than one question per ticket. Those one short-answer-span per ticket were barely helpful and waisted 3 weeks of my life before i decided to move on. I’m left to guess if they meant to answer the first or second point in my ticket…Hell they found a way to answer half of one sentence question.
    Two weekends out of three, their (24/7) support answered Monday questions submitted on Saturday. On other days you might submit a ticket and hope for your answer from an acceptable 15 mn. to two hours later. so an open ticket will run for days. No matter how frustrated you are, their short answer is always canned in a preformatted nice “On your own. Go away.”
    The pre-sale “we’ll guide you step by step is a stretch of pure BS that left me in frustration for lack of satisfying support answers.
    Now I was not ready for VPS and should have prepared myself or paid for their 99/month support but I wanted to push my self to learning the ins and outs of moving a site to this VPS. In the end I went back to shared hosting until further notice. That will come when i’m personally linux ready or my sites’ traffic justifies a managed support at a 99$/month.

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  • http://www.flickaclip.co.uk Dave

    I’ve had fantastic experience with VPS.NET – I think a lot of the complaints are from people who don’t really understand what they are buying. If you don’t know how to set up a server from scratch then buy a ready made web-hosting service. The uptime has been fantastic aside from a DoS attack that took everyone out for a few hours.

    The whole system is very flexible and the nodes appear to run very fast – my site does lots of intensive video and image processing and runs well with just a couple of nodes.

    • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

      You’re probably right about that. I’ve had good experiences so far, except for a DDoS or two that were mitigated fairly quickly. Pretty much any server instability I may have is just misoptimizations on my part. :)

  • Jenni

    I’m so surprised to see positive reviews here posted on Nov 10, 2010. I spent my entire day today chasing after VPS for any type of response or customer service help from them. In the process, I have only discovered incredibly negative reviews online, and Twitter is exploding with angry, frustrated, disgruntled customers. VPS is responding to these people with snarky, sarcastic, belittling remarks – in a public forum no less, as opposed to responding privately to pleas for help (or, better yet, actually helping).

    After experiencing a major crash with our last hosting company, we were directed to VPS.net, and our developer handled the migration (he is very experienced in managing a VPS). Since then, we’ve experienced random lag and slowness on the site. Today was the worst by far, and then suddenly our site went down for no reason. VPS does not even provide a phone number – you have to open tickets, email, and then wait. I have not heard from them in over FIVE HOURS. Customers are panicked about their sites having been down for over 15 hours. The downage is already unacceptable, the lack of communication adds insult to injury, and the fact that the existing communication is rude is appalling. It is, by far, the worst customer service I have ever experienced, from any company. Incredibly disappointing.

    We will be leaving VPS ASAP, along with what seem to be a majority of their customers on Twitter.

  • plestus

    Linode. And never looked back. 6 months, not a problem. And I am running some pretty bleeding edge stuff that tends to go bad often. Better wiki, better structure. They are like the In n’ Out of cloud hosting: They don’t have CDN, they don’t have Daily Nodes (though the concept itself is an oxymoron….ANY node is a daily node if you want it to be), little advertising, but their stuff WORKS….I only needed to talk to tech support ONCE and that was for an issue with may account in their forum, not their products. Stackscripts FAR better than their pre-package stuff.

    These British ruskies suck the sweat out of a dead man’s balls. They even manage to screw up West Host, which up until they got bought by the UK Group NEVER had a problem. Since then….forget about it.