One year ago, I purchased a VPS from QuickWeb. I found the deal at my one of my favorite sites for cheap hosting: www.lowendbox.com. The deal was:

• OpenVZ VPS
• 256MB RAM/386 Burst
• 10G disk space
• 250GB bandwidth/ Month on 1 IP
• $35.88/ 1 Year

I ordered without much of a problem and my Debian server was provisioned within a few minutes. I was a happy camper. $2.99/month is a great deal for root access to a server, even one with such meager specs. I’ve had a decent year of hosting with QuickWeb, but I decided to take my business elsewhere when my plan came up for renewal. To help explain why,  I want to share the three support tickets I had to open with them. This will give you the clearest idea of what you get for the money. I Would have included the full text of these exchanges, but they insert a privacy notice in the signature of their support emails, so i’m worried that I may have agreed to something in their TOS.

1. The server that QuickWeb provisioned for me was fully loaded. For me, that wasn’t such a good thing. The server already had web, DNS, and mail server software installed and running (apache, named, and postfix IIRC).  I wasn’t comfortable with that because I prefer to start from scratch, planned on using nginx and didn’t need to run a DNS and public mail server. I opened a ticket asking if i could get a server provisioned that only includes the base Debian install. The response from QuickWeb was that they don’t have a minimal template ‘yet’, but that I could uninstall packages that i don’t need using apt-get. Thanks.
2. In July of last year, there was a service interruption. This site was down.  Not just me, I checked stuff like connecting from a few other servers that I have access too and, of course, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/. I opened a ticket. An hour and a half later, a response told me that I had sent the ticket to sales instead of the helpdesk and next time, to use the helpdesk for faster response. Another hour and a half later, they replied and told me that the VPS was actually up the whole time, but there was a brief network interruption in their management network, so I wan’t able to connect to check the status of my VPS. I had to reiterrate that whether or not the server was UP, It was unreachable over the network for an hour and a half.  The last reply from them came 8 hours in. They asked me to do stuff like turn off IPtables and give them a traceroute.
   I gave them a ticket without a lot of information, somehow sent it into their sales queue, but it took them 8 hours to get me a semi-intelligent response.  They never acknowleged a problem with public connectivity to my server.
3. The isue that sealed the deal for me happened this December when QuickWeb changed the IP of my server. Despite their claims to have notified me, I never got an email from them. I used a gmail account to handle all their communication with me.  Yes, even checked the spam folder. No notice. I submitted a ticket for this one too and all they did was tell me that they sent me emails about it while I told them that they didn’t.

The server this site is runing on now is a KVM VPS from bitcable. So far the support there is night and day compared with QuickWeb.  Preetam helped me set up the virtIO drivers on FreeBSD. More on that later.