I’d written before about a really good VPS deal and how I was using it for additional secondary DNS. Not entirely surprisingly, that provider seems to have entirely vanished shortly after sending me an email at the end of my 1-month account asking me to renew (hard to renew when their web site doesn’t exist anymore). This has sent me looking for another deal, since I still think the premise is good. The two providers I landed on are PTXL and Budget VPS Hosting/Web Wide Hosting. While both seem decent on the face of it and while I don’t yet have enough experience with either to give a proper review, I can safely say that I’m becoming even more appreciative of RapidVPS, with whom I have my primary VPSs that do all my substantive serving.
My experience thusfar with PTXL is that while they sent me login info almost immediately upon registration yesterday, they didn’t actually activate that info until about 20 hours later, so I couldn’t even *buy* the thing until today. Now, I go to buy it and find that I have to add the money to my account, then use it to buy and that I can only add money through PayPal and that they charge a fee to add money through PayPal. This makes their advertised price deceptive, though their quarterly pricing, even with the PayPal fees, is still quite reasonable. Once I navigated the payment mechanics, the VPS turnup was almost instant.
My experience with Budget VPS/Web Wide is a bit different. While the Web Wide site refers you to the Budget VPS site, the Budget VPS site kicks you back to Web Wide to actually transact business. Strange. Account creation was essentially instant, payment via PayPal was simple (no extra fees), and almost immediately yesterday, a VPS appeared in my account panel with status “pending.” After a few minutes of this, I went digging through their knowledge base and it was suggested that while turnup is generally quick, it may take up to 24 hours or longer and that if it’d be over 24 hours, they’d email. I was not thrilled with this, but I’d already paid and I’m not in all that much of a rush. I came home tonight, about 30 hours after creation, to find it still “pending” and no email from them, so I’ve filed a support ticket.
Just for comparison, RapidVPS charges what they say they charge, no extra fees, deals directly with payment, no PayPal, and account creation and turnup are both really instant, no messing around. I’ve also been using them for a while and they don’t seem to be vanishing into the mist anytime soon. Oh, and when I was just starting out and had a few total n00b questions, they were really nice and helpful (at no extra charge!).
Comments 2
Hi, thanks for mentioning our service on your blog! Our provisioning system is indeed instant; and this is quickly becoming the standard.
We are always looking to improve our service and features, so let me know if you have any ideas or criticisms.
Cheers
Posted 31 Aug 2008 at 1:34 pm ¶Rick Blundell
rickb@rapidvps.com
Rick–
Thanks for providing such good service. At the moment, the only additional things I think I could possibly want from RapidVPS would be:
1. servers in a geographically-different and differently-connected datacenter, and perhaps a more limited, cheaper account, so that I could stop messing around with super-cheap VPS providers that don’t give the same level of service and use RapidVPS to get a nameserver set up somewhere outside the datacenter that has my other VPSs with you; and
2. either a plan somewhere between Rapid.One and Rapid.Two that gave the memory of Rapid.Two without the disk and CPU and for less money or an a la carte extra-memory option.
As I’d said, though, I continue to be very happy with RapidVPS and almost everything I do online (including this blog) is hosted on two Rapid.One VPSs.