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Advantagecom - $6 256MB Xen VPS

SimplyWebhosting Via this WHT offer, Advantagecom, with claimed “uncompromising integrity in web hosting since 1998” and “nearly 7 years of VPS hosting”, is offering some time-limited specials with recurring discount. With coupon code 6dollarstarter, you can get the following VPS:

  • 256MB memory
  • 21GB storage
  • 5Mbit/sec unmetered bandwidth
  • 1.5Ghz virtual CPU
  • BlueOnyx control panel

Very good deal indeed, consider hwVPS 2009 Starter usually costs $30/month. Their website traceroute to Walla Walla in Washington.

LEA
Latest posts by LEA (see all)

13 Comments

  1. Peter:

    Offer seem to have expired by now, only $30 left

    June 27, 2009 @ 9:29 am | Reply
  2. Promotion expires on 30 June according to the WHT offer. Did you apply the coupon code?

    June 27, 2009 @ 12:21 pm | Reply
  3. Over 40 hours and still not sign of VPS being set-up. Has anyone else had to wait ?

    June 30, 2009 @ 6:42 pm | Reply
  4. Malcolm:

    It took 10 days for me to get my “5 day Ubuntu” VPS. They had time to send me a thank you card in the mail and invoice me for yet another month of service though!

    July 10, 2009 @ 5:18 am | Reply
  5. John:

    Malcolm, do not be too picky. There are not many providers out there sending nice thank you cards!

    July 12, 2009 @ 2:14 am | Reply
  6. Brendan and Malcom,

    We did get a little backlogged with setups.

    Brendan was setup in 8 business days and Malcom (that’s not the name he gave us) was setup in 8 business days. Yes, we were 3 days behind on Debian and Ubuntu setups due to the unexpected popularity of the offer, but we did catch up and they are now being setup in 1 business day.

    As for “They had time to send me a thank you card in the mail and invoice me for yet another month of service though!”, you must consider that we are not a one man show and some departments have more time on their hands than others. Also, billing is automated and requires no manual labor at all to generate an invoice, so it is always on time.

    The reason you got a second invoice 5 or 6 days after ordering is that monthly invoices are generated 25 days before their due date to allow you plenty of time to pay the bill or deal with declined/expired credit cards without service interruption.

    If you contact billing@advantagecom.net they are more than willing to adjust your account for the delay in setup so that you’re only paying for days after we started your service.

    July 14, 2009 @ 9:50 am | Reply
  7. John:

    Andrew, luckily you identified Malcolm in a vast sea of customers!

    July 18, 2009 @ 4:31 am | Reply
  8. John,

    We only had one Ubuntu hwVPS order on that promotion, so that “vast sea” didn’t encompass him. Most selected operating systems that are more popular on servers.

    July 18, 2009 @ 8:25 am | Reply
  9. Only one Ubuntu order? That does seem a bit odd as I saw Ubuntu 8.04LTS or 9.04 being very popular in another VPS provider that I’ve been with (although I do prefer Debian 5 at the moment).

    July 18, 2009 @ 9:12 am | Reply
  10. Malcolm:

    I canceled service with them almost two months ago and they have confirmed that it was scheduled to be terminated just over a month ago. One week after termination they invoiced me and have continued to remind me that the invoice is due and just sent me an overdue notice. Multiple attempts at contacting them have resulted in no response. This company is unresponsive and should be avoided.

    March 2, 2010 @ 9:48 pm | Reply
  11. Malcom,

    If you give me some information that I could use to find your billing account (real name, domain name, invoice ID, or account ID), I could look into it and see where things went sideways. Unfortunately, I do not remember which account is yours. Your experience is not typical. Our regular billing person is out on maternity leave, but we do have someone filling in for her. I don’t know if that is a factor here until I can look at your actual account, though.

    Our billing and notifications are automated, but cancellations require manual processing, so it could be that’s where it is hung up.

    As of last week, though, all cancellations had been processed, so I think something else is happening here.

    You mentioned you couldn’t get a response through multiple contact attempts. What method did you use to contact us and what dates were those contacts? I want to also look into why you haven’t gotten a response. It could be as simple as spam filtering. It is somewhat common for our billing responses sent by email to be automatically placed in the customers’ gmail junk folders because they didn’t whitelist us. This type of communication issue isn’t isolated to just our company.

    At any rate, this is all speculation until I can actually look up your account.

    March 15, 2010 @ 3:40 pm | Reply
  12. kz:

    Awful experience – 3 days of nagging support to get my IP, cut-n-paste support emails to hell, server was deleted for TOS violation without any cause OR notification, then support said “you didn’t purchase email support plan”. I don’t need support – UNLESS MY VPS IS DELETED WITHOUT WARNING OR CAUSE. Probably it got hacked because all provisioning was done in plaintext. Whatever. Now I get try for a refund… what a waste of time!

    September 19, 2011 @ 3:53 am | Reply
    • kz,

      You didn’t buy one of the plans mentioned in this article. You purchased something else entirely.

      You didn’t have to “nag” anyone to get your IP. It was sent to you immediately upon setup. If you didn’t get the setup email due to spam filters on your end, you simply needed to login to the billing control panel and click “emails” to see the setup email.

      We don’t do “cut-n-paste” support emails. I don’t know why you would think that.

      Yes, we terminated your ultra-low-cost-high-potential-liability copyright infringing activities when they were noticed.

      The account you purchased only included ticketed support, so if you’d been paying attention to what you ordered and used the account for legitimate purposes, you would have had a much better experience.

      Our investigation indicated that you were not hacked and that you were just using that to try to sidestep the fact that you got caught.

      “Provisioning” is not done in plain text. Provisioning is done over SSH, but the setup information is sent to you by email in plain text. If you think that’s bad because you download your email over a coffee shop unencrypted WiFi or some other method where you have cause to believe it is compromised, change the root password, but leave our tech support SSH keys in place and you’re covered.

      To others reading this, this “kz” fellow has named it his mission to post bad comments everywhere he can in an effort to get his “revenge” for us catching and terminating his illegal activities. Because he is outside the United States, it is not worth our time or money to try to prosecute him for libel, so we just follow him around posting our side of the story.

      September 30, 2011 @ 6:32 am | Reply

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