When transitioning from traditional shared hosting to more powerful products with root access, the clear choice is to utilize a virtual private server (VPS), and VPS.net has made their name offering great virtual private server hosting products to consumers. Unfortunately, it fails to pair these great VPS offerings with top-notch support and reliability, and that can be a major drag for the sort of novice, budget-conscious consumers who choose the company for their needs. VPS.net has a strong product on paper but some customers might find it hard to commit to when they discover the way that product is offered.

Software-Based Virtual Private Server Hosting Plans

Well, this is certainly interesting. At VPS.net, virtual private server hosting isn’t designated according to scalable hardware specifications, but is done more according to which software needs to run on the server. To that end, the company offers plans that can efficiently run Ruby on Rails, Asterisk, OpenVPN, Magento, and WordPress as primary installations. Those customers interested in purchasing a virtual private server plan with the company will need to define just want they want to do with their server before they actually purchase it and put it into use.

The virtual private server plans at VPS.net are ultra-affordable where it concerns their base monthly price. Every server comes with a full terabyte of monthly data transfer, which is almost excessive for products in this category. Hard disk space is offered at 10GB, while dedicated memory on these servers is 376MB. Customers will get 0.6GHz of dedicated processing power, and they’ll pay just $20 per month for it (although the company advertises that this service costs them $1 per day).

Reliability Will Cost Extra at VPS.net

Virtual private server shoppers should be aware that they will not be covered by any form of an uptime guarantee or a service level agreement unless they pay for the company’s fully-managed server package which costs an extra $99 per month. That brings the average cost of a virtual private server with the company to $119 monthly for customers that are worried about potential downtime.

Those customers who do buy the extra service package for full management will find that they are treated to a 100 percent uptime guarantee that applies to both the network installation and the server hardware itself. That’s nice, but it’s not worth an extra $99 per month. No other host even tries to pull this kind of stunt when it comes to pricing and reliability.

Technical Support is Also Not Free at VPS.net

Virtual private server customers who count on robust tech support should stop considering VPS.net after the following sentence. No free server maintenance or technical support is offered to customers who don’t buy the company’s server management plan at $99 per month. Instead, virtual private server customers at VPS.net will have to take their chances with the “hosting support” line during business hours. Otherwise, they’ll pay $10 per support ticket that they file with the company. They advertise it as ‘one issue, one ticket’ and that’s fine — except for customers who have multi-issue problems all contributing to their hosting woes. Then it’s pretty expensive.

The lack of a live chat solution (except for sales) is also inexcusable. For 24-hour support, the company’s website directs customers to a support-centric Twitter account. Not much support can be provided in 140 ASCII characters, but the company apparently thinks prospective virtual private server buyers will reward it for at least trying.

Probably Not a Good Choice for Low-End Consumers

For those customers who have the extra money to spend on a $99 support and management package attached to a $20 virtual private server, VPS.net is probably a wonderful host. For those who would rather not spend five times their monthly hosting fee just to enjoy an uptime guarantee, however, VPS.net is an option that should not be an option at all.