Not all VPS providers are equal. That is to say that you get what you pay for and while I’m paying more than I was, I want to take a minute to make a recommendation for a company that has gone out of their way to help me allocate a new home for many of my web services. In this case I’m talking about Point North Networks / Kickass VPS.
You see I have been a customer of burst.net for quite some time and frankly it’s only because I gave them every opportunity to address some serious issues in their performance. I monitor my VPS closely looking at uptime, utilization, processes and response content and the number of outages I experienced at burst.net were severe. Calls to support were often greeted by someone who sounded 20 years old, dazed and confused. It would generally go like this:
Me: Yes I have a VPS that is not responding. A traceroute is not completing to the first hop at your network.
Them: Oh. Uh ok. We’ll uh, have someone look at that.
Me: Ok… can you have someone contact me and let me know the ETA?
Them: Uh, sure.
Me: Ok. Thanks.
Them: Ok. Bye.
Now that I’ve transitioned, the difference is night and day. If I open a ticket someone looks into it while I’m on the phone. If I’m on chat, they get me a case number and follow-up. I had a case where a strange circumstance after a patch caused a kernel panic and the owner connected up at 2:00am and fixed it. It’s a small company but everyone I’ve worked with has been directly invested in keeping things running.
So Point North Networks gets my geek stamp of approval and kudos on the record. Good job, guys.
