I had previously found lowendbox.com and lowendtalk.com. These sites post about low cost VPS servers.
I have been working on a project that will require a VPS at some point hopefully. I’m on holiday and it was the new year, so I was browsing around to see if there were any good deals for a cheap, but reliable VPS.
I had previously targeted RamNode and Prometeus as possibly good deals.
RamNode have said they no longer do specials, but Prometeus had a 24 month deal for Xen servers in their Dallas data center. I was after a US location, so this sounded nice. I really would have liked 1 Gig of RAM, but the most Prometeus had available was 512MB of RAM. I decided I would try them out anyway.
So I signed up with Prometeus and was told my address was wrong by the automated system. Of course it wasn’t and I sent them an email asking how to proceed forward.
About 3 hours later I received a fairly abrupt reply that they could not provide me the service until I sent them the correct data. I sent them a reply suggesting it was definitely correct and a Google Maps link with the address.
About 40 minutes later I received no reply and decided I had received better customer service at most of the other hosts I used. I was also wondering how Prometeus had such good reviews. I decided to send them an email that I no longer required their services. It was time to look for somewhere more inline with my expectations.
I then quickly received a response saying, “I am sorry, it is the law.”
My reply was, “It’s law that you can’t provide services to an address that every other service I have ever used has had no problem with and is accessible via Google Maps? Interesting. Probably explains the Italian economy ;) Ciao :)”
I then got another quick reply about laws and them obeying laws etc and also something that the astute reader might have already picked up on… IP address and phone number. I had hardly tried to hide this, given I provided a foreign mobile number I am using on my holiday. They never confirmed this, but it seems they decided to give me a run around because I was on holiday. I could have set up the account on my return home, but Prometeus seem to treat their potential customers poorly, or maybe foreign language has crept into my vernacular whilst on holiday and I sound suspect.
Anyway, I seem to have wasted enough time on Prometeus, so I guess I will have to try one of their competitors like, RamNode. RamNode knocked them off their top spot in the lowendbox.com top provider poll. RamNode also seemed to have better options for upgrading my account when my needs hopefully grow. There is also DDoS protection available on their US servers. Hopefully RamNode can live up to the great feedback and not make me feel like I am a suspected criminal.