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Top Low End VPS Providers (2012 Q2)

Liam made this thread on LET, asking all users in the community to vote for their TOP provider, making it roughly 150  replies before the time was up and the votes were counted.

The rules were simple:

  • You can’t vote for your company.
  • One entry per person
  • You can list 1-3 vps providers, and you can also list honourable mentions.
  • Valid reason for each of your chosen providers
  • You plan has to be within the <$7 limit
  • The first provider listed will receive 3 points, second 2 points and the third 1 point.

 

The score

Buyvm: 64 Points [HM x 4]
Prometeus: 42 Points [HM x 4]
Hostigation: 41 Points [HM x 3]
Edis: 36 Points [HM]
ChicagoVPS: 27 Points [HM]

Providers with Honourable Mentions but without points:
123Systems: HM [x2].
123COM: HM.

Dishonorable mention
TechieVPS: DM [x2].

 

As a bonus to this competition, liam offered to give a random user who voted, a choice between different plans from one of the top 3 providers.

The winner of this generous prize were NanoG6 who decided on a BuyVM 128MB yearly KVM

Congratulations to those great hosts who can provide both great services and good price! And thanks to all who have participated in voting. And even more special thank you to liam for resurrecting the poll.

 

For those of you who are interested; Here’s a picture of liam’s sock which was used to draw the lucky winner

 

 

58 Comments

  1. camarg:

    congrats to Buyvm, Prometeus, Hostigation & Edis

    June 13, 2012 @ 9:51 pm | Reply
    • and ChicagoVPS :)

      June 13, 2012 @ 10:51 pm | Reply
      • Thanks Kevin. :)

        June 14, 2012 @ 3:13 am | Reply
      • Yani:

        If ChicagoVPS makes it to this list then that alone tells this list is very, very absurd. EDIS is okay and I’m their customer, but the VPS is far from the best.

        The others I haven’t tested. Prometeus looks interesting though.

        June 15, 2012 @ 3:08 pm | Reply
        • Very absurd?

          Thanks for the comment.

          June 18, 2012 @ 4:56 am | Reply
        • Yani:

          Yep. Your service is horrible.

          June 19, 2012 @ 3:48 pm | Reply
        • James:

          I agree completely about ChicagoVPS, their service is horrible. Coincidentally, I also purchased an EDIS and it’s the best of all the server’s I’ve ever had. I can only hope that it doesn’t start having issues like my Inception Hosting VPS, which was great until last month when they started getting DDoSed, and then a NIC issue, and more DDoS, and they still have magical downtime every so often that they can’t seem to find, even when their panel says my server is offline. ThrustVPS is also in my top hosts, and they aren’t even that great, either. I guess it just shows the quality of the huge majority of providers (they suck).

          August 6, 2012 @ 12:55 am | Reply
  2. john:

    Why LEB makes this kind of thread?
    This kind belongs to LET not LEB, in my opinion, maybe wrong…

    June 14, 2012 @ 12:37 am | Reply
    • MikHo:

      Because LEB is not only a discount blog, where you get the most value for your dollars. Its about low end boxes and almost everything about them.

      This kind of polls have been posted before here, everytime it has been executed (voting) on LET. results published on LEB.

      if you don’t like it, skip this post and read the next one instead.

      thank you

      June 14, 2012 @ 4:12 am | Reply
  3. Spirit:

    The biggest surprise on this list is for sure Prometeus. Not because they wouldn’t provide good service as their service is top notch (from personal experience), but because this company barely appeared at LEB/LET and (even with location which maybe isn’t that interesting for most North American and Asian LEB visitors) they earned our trust and wallets :P They are real winner of this 2012 Q2 list!
    And as I predicted some time ago once popular RAMHost has gone from the top of this list.

    June 14, 2012 @ 12:39 am | Reply
    • Spirit:

      Oh, and I forget to congratulate also to all rest top voted providers from this list :) So, congratulations – good work!

      June 14, 2012 @ 12:41 am | Reply
  4. Congrats Prometeus, been with them for few months now. Great service. Also for BuyVM, the winner, and the rest of providers listed. And thanks LEB/LET for being kind providing a “warm” place for the community.

    Cheers!

    June 14, 2012 @ 1:14 am | Reply
  5. hein:

    well well.. where’s ramhost.. where’s quickweb.. :/

    June 14, 2012 @ 1:55 am | Reply
    • MikHo:

      Read the LET thread and you will get all the results.

      June 14, 2012 @ 4:14 am | Reply
    • rm:

      Both of these were overrated from the beginning, never understood why they got high places even back then.
      Last offer from Ramhost was 2 years ago, ffs. http://www.lowendbox.com/tag/ramhost-us/
      “Wah wah, where’s ramhost!” I dunno, write to Ramhost and ask?

      June 14, 2012 @ 6:45 am | Reply
    • Popularity contest? On LEB? NO WAY

      June 14, 2012 @ 9:51 am | Reply
    • Very possible that since it only ran for 2 days that many people were not even aware of it. Think of it more as a quick snapshot of peoples feelings who happened to be on LET at the time.

      Congrats to all winners : )

      June 18, 2012 @ 10:25 am | Reply
  6. ufufgnaf:

    I have had very bad experience with 123COM. How comes it got a honourable mention? They would not refund anything even if you cancel within 7 days. Emailed their support and they told me to wait for their “Billing Manager”. I have waited for about 2 months now.

    June 14, 2012 @ 2:04 am | Reply
  7. jcaleb:

    congrats to all winners!

    June 14, 2012 @ 5:02 am | Reply
  8. paul:

    I got a little scared of Prometeus because of their TOS, but in other regards their offer is very attractive. The TOS is ridiculous, it says they send you a password (in cleartext presumably), then hold you responsible if someone else intercepts and misuses it. All sorts of content is prohibited basically if it offends anyone. Your real name and address must be included (not clear whether that means publicly) with anything you publish, etc.

    I can presumably change the password right away and I wasn’t planning to put a web site on the vps anyway, so there are still uses for it, but it’s disturbing that they would write a thing like that.

    http://www.prometeus.net/sito/term-of-service

    June 14, 2012 @ 5:17 am | Reply
    • Paul, some of the tos/aup rules were in place for the shared hosting services (before the vps). The published content is one of them and I’ve now corrected this.

      June 14, 2012 @ 6:32 am | Reply
      • paul:

        The publication stuff does look better now. What’s the situation with that password? How is it sent to the user? Can the user change it through the SSL control panel (e.g. through a ticket)? If it’s sent by cleartext email and the only way to change it is to have another one sent by cleartext email, changing it doesn’t help much :(.

        June 14, 2012 @ 8:00 am | Reply
        • password are in clear text emails when initial accounts are set. Then you can change all of them through the whmcs or solusvm control panel (both using ssl) and root password can be changed using ssh as well.

          June 14, 2012 @ 8:07 am | Reply
        • paul:

          Thanks, that is reasonable. BuyVM sends initial passwords in the mail the same way and does a few other annoying things with VNC passwords. I manage to live with it.

          June 14, 2012 @ 4:04 pm | Reply
      • paul:

        OK, I could not resist, I placed my order for a KVM1.

        This is the lowest price I’ve seen for a KVM, 11.25 Euro or 14.25 USD for a 128MB VPS with 6GB disk. The LEB thread is here:

        http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/prometeus-e11-25year-128mb-kvm-vps-in-italy/

        and the promotion code still works and there is a fair amount of stock left. For those of us not needing a lot of disk or bandwidth and who like the idea of a VPS in Italy, this is one of the best LEB bargains ever. Thanks for the excellent VPS offer.

        June 15, 2012 @ 8:00 am | Reply
      • paul:

        Aaaand, very nice, it was either instant setup or someone approved my vps very quickly. Debian install from .it debian mirror went smoothly. It’s a similar install-by-VNC to what buyvm uses, so maybe it’s a standard whmcs thing. I have several buyvm vps’s so when I need to use vnc I set up an ssh tunnel to a vps on buyvm’s internal network, and connect to the vnc port through that, so the traffic on the public internet is encrypted. On prometeus with just one vps, I guess I just change the vnc password every time I use it, not a big deal since it’s just for OS installs and the like.

        Typing to the vps is a little bit laggy as expected (170 ms ping time from the USA, not bad). Ping to my inceptionhosting vps in .NL is 17 msec which is great. File transfer from same .NL VPS is almost 6 MB/sec which is fantastic compared to what I’m used to. From buyVM (San Jose) I get about 760KB/s, still pretty quick by LEB standards, and I think the bottleneck may be at their end.

        This is great! Highly recommended.

        June 15, 2012 @ 8:39 am | Reply
        • paul:

          I should add, that 170ms ping is from buyvm in California. From New York (alienlayer), ping is about 100 msec.

          June 15, 2012 @ 7:26 pm | Reply
        • Hi Paul,

          – Stallion 2 will have direct SSH tunnel support so you can do it from an outside source right to the node
          — SSH keys will be used for this, you can define however many keys as you like per VM
          – You may want to check the news on our east coast location, should give you a nice drop in ping
          – I think Aldyric addressed the email passwords thing this past sales round.

          Thanks for the feedback :)

          Francisco

          June 20, 2012 @ 11:00 am | Reply
          • Daniel:

            Will I get a notification about eastern locations from the OVZ newsletter?

            June 20, 2012 @ 1:01 pm | Reply
  9. Glass:

    VooServers is missing too. This was too short a voting?

    June 14, 2012 @ 5:24 am | Reply
    • rm:

      > This was too short a voting?
      No it wasn’t.
      When was last time you saw a new deal from VooServers?
      Over 7 months ago, http://www.lowendbox.com/tag/vooservers-com/ and it wasn’t even a particularly great one.
      Cease being active with good deals, people move elsewhere, simple as that.

      June 14, 2012 @ 6:40 am | Reply
      • dirk:

        Isn’t this a poll about good service and good value for the money?
        It’s not because their offer is 7 months old that the service isn’t good. I’m using Vooservers for a long time now and they are top, I also voted for them (that’s the 3 points they got).

        June 14, 2012 @ 7:37 am | Reply
      • @rm sorry, I didn’t knew we were voting for “new deals”, if so whats the new deal from buyvm? hostigation?

        I humbly disagree from your point of view. It was about great service and being LEB at the same time.

        June 14, 2012 @ 8:37 am | Reply
        • rm:

          People were voting for anything they wanted. Almost no one voted for VooServers. Simple as that, #2.
          I don’t understand what are you trying to propose, a 6-month long voting period? Even then % wouldn’t change much, only more counting work for liam.
          Prometheus is massive right now, BuyVM always was, Hostigation I guess also keeps being visible and active, so everyone voted for those. By the way note it’s “Top providers 2012 Q2”, not top providers of all time, or historically.

          June 14, 2012 @ 9:02 am | Reply
        • @rm You said

          > When was last time you saw a new deal from VooServers?

          The poll was not about that. The limited time has not given chance to people to actually vote to VooServers or any other quality service they were using. Simple as that.

          June 14, 2012 @ 10:17 am | Reply
        • Secondly, I never took that poll seriously because

          1) It was not officially announced
          2) It was from a user, not from a moderator

          June 14, 2012 @ 10:20 am | Reply
        • rm:

          > The limited time has not given chance to people to actually vote to VooServers
          150 votes and 1 to them, with 1500 votes there’d be 10 to them, like I said that changes nothing.

          June 14, 2012 @ 10:40 am | Reply
        • @rm I still don’t agree. Probably the last 100 voters may only vote for VooServers? you cannot predict human psyche

          I have looked closely at all the past votes of top lowend provider and everything we could spot one such case where one big name has a lot of votes in the very end.

          June 14, 2012 @ 11:02 am | Reply
        • Spirit:

          I voted for vooservers last year but I wouldn’t this year. They are still same people, I still get regular notifications about service, etc.. it’s just… their service. It’s good, really good but not as great as some other hosts performance. Maintenance, packet loss, maintenance again packet loss… this doesn’t make top host. They are professional and I am sure that they will do things the best they can it’s just… not so perfect.

          June 14, 2012 @ 2:11 pm | Reply
        • @Spirit It does not make sense. We have a host among top list which is not so great in services but still its there, why? VooServers has at least been giving us good and stable service at LEB-criteria prices

          June 15, 2012 @ 9:00 am | Reply
      • Spirit:

        Asim Zeeshan I expressed my personal opinion based on my personal experience. Just as you said VooServers is good by LEB-criteria prices and if things won’t go at worse I have attempt to stay their client however from other side I am hosted with few even “better” (more stable, etc..) providers which would get my 3 votes if I would vote.

        And what does not make sense? That hosts with bigger, sometimes way bigger LEB customer base get here more votes? If one of those hosts get only 2% of happy customer base votes it’s still more than maybe as example 10% of happy vooservers customer base votes. Also don’t forget that those votes are often spreaded among european hosts like evorack, OpenITC/xenvz, vooservers, inceptionhosting… while some AllSimple sadly undeserved don’t get even a vote. List is simply too huge which is great from my LEB consumers view.

        June 15, 2012 @ 3:35 pm | Reply
        • For the record, I am with most of the hosts mentioned above especially the top three

          I was just raising my voice for the unofficial poll we had

          June 18, 2012 @ 11:55 am | Reply
    • Glass:

      Ah ok, so this was unofficial. I remembered the announcement we used to have from LEB and was thinking I missed seeing it since it was open only a couple of days this time.

      In my experience as a customer, Vooservers though not perfect is much ahead of some of the providers voted as top, on several counts – including how they communicate with customers and being helpful – thus my surprise.

      June 17, 2012 @ 6:39 pm | Reply
      • Glass:

        Please read LEB as LEA

        June 17, 2012 @ 6:40 pm | Reply
  10. Congratulations to all, personally I saw the thread and hated the thread-view-for-voting, the OSQA view was much better but we cannot get it back. May be for next time we can use a third party service to vote for favorite provider?

    Congratulations once again!!

    June 14, 2012 @ 8:36 am | Reply
    • jcaleb:

      its good the top poll is back!

      June 15, 2012 @ 7:20 am | Reply
  11. WhiteWolf:

    ChicagoVps!

    June 14, 2012 @ 8:51 pm | Reply
    • :) We are getting there. One day we will be on top of the world. Mwuahahahahahaha.

      June 18, 2012 @ 4:59 am | Reply
      • a:

        Perhaps one day Jeremiah Shinkle learns not to be an ass.

        June 18, 2012 @ 5:18 am | Reply
      • Just like I told Chris, you take over the world $20 at a time, so your plan is flawed :P

        June 19, 2012 @ 6:25 pm | Reply
  12. In the post Liam_ is a link, you added a space to the href tag ;)

    June 15, 2012 @ 12:18 pm | Reply
    • mikho:

      and? The link still takes you to liam, the user :)

      June 17, 2012 @ 1:36 pm | Reply
  13. hackersbox:

    i love URPAD.net

    June 17, 2012 @ 9:33 pm | Reply
  14. go:

    I liked the picture of liam’s grey pants, it seems ainteresting post , goes to my favourites to read later on!

    June 19, 2012 @ 7:49 pm | Reply
  15. I have a vps in hostigation, very good service, but i only use the vps for test development, now i try buyvm but the low cost plan is out of stock.

    June 30, 2012 @ 4:42 pm | Reply
  16. alex:

    I have been with 123com (ImagineLayer now) for 8 months. Leyton is a nice guy he answered all the question. It is all started good, but then they began to have sudden interruptions in service, every time promising “This will not happen again”. This culminated (can I use this word?) in August when my host went offline and never came back. I lost everything. I spent 4 weeks trying to get it back. At some point they stopped to pick up the phones, let alone the tickets. I think they have something terrible happened there. I would recommend to stay away from 123COM or ImagineLayer, this is how they are called after rebranding.

    September 19, 2012 @ 9:10 pm | Reply
    • alex:

      Now the funny part goes, this is the email from 123com /imagine layer I got today:
      ————————-
      This is the third and final billing notice that your invoice no. 5490 which was generated on 23/09/2012 is overdue.

      As you have failed to complete payment within 5 days, we have now terminated your services.

      Your payment method is: PayPal

      Invoice: 5490
      Amount Due: $31.28 USD
      Due Date: 07/10/2012

      You can login to your client area to view and pay the invoice at http://secure.123com.org/viewinvoice.php?id=5490

      Your login details are as follows:

      Email Address: ale…….com
      Password: **********

      If this balance is not settled within 24 hours this invoice will be sent to our collections department.
      —————

      They are saying that the service has been terminated (yeah, the server just went offline 3 month ago), however I am welcome to pay (!) and if not…. they will tell send it to collection dept.

      Amazingly smart and polite people.

      October 11, 2012 @ 10:09 pm | Reply
  17. When I initially commented I appear to have clicked on the -Notify me when new comments
    are added- checkbox and from now on each time a comment
    is added I receive 4 emails with the exact same comment.
    Is there a means you are able to remove me from that service?
    Kudos!

    August 19, 2016 @ 9:18 pm | Reply

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