I signed up in September 2009 and I'm still technically a customer but I won't be once renewal rolls around.

The problems are numerous, the management are great, they really care (Nick, Terry etc) but the product and support team are pitiful. I assume as you're a customer you've got access to the customer forum? Take a look at the problems people face. vps.net is great when it works, but the second something goes wrong I've found myself nothing but screwed and personally how the system and team handle when things go wrong is what matters most.

"Self healing with automatic failover" is a joke. I've had 2 periods of 10 hour+ downtime on tiny servers, I've also had numerous "small" downtimes that lasted between 30 minutes and 2 hours. The reasons for these range from technicians making mistakes ("replaced ram incorrectly") to the technology just not being able to cope.

I wish I could stick with vps.net, their flexibility isn't beaten by anyone but the stability and support is incredibly poor. If I were to totally ignore any times my server has been rebooted because of me (so assume 1 year = 1 year of uptime) the longest my server(s -- I used to run multiple with them) have been online is 90 days. They can't go 90 days without a problem, where problems range from 30 minutes to 10 hours.

The last straw for me was my server being inaccessible for almost 90 minutes, the reason? I had been nullrouted and that isn't the bad part... I submitted a support ticket explaining that my server was down (I originally logged in to the control panel after I couldn't get in via SSH and saw many disk errors) I got a canned "reboot plz" response, I sent a reply saying that didn't work, he replied "I can connect from here!" so I replied "Well I can't!" and included a link that showed it wasn't just me (http://i.imgur.com/NtXi9.jpg) then his next reply "oh, it appears you've been nullrouted!" (this was an hour after I first submitted my ticket) so I reply asking when it'll be back, they ignore me and then 15 minutes later it's accessible again and the ticket was closed...

...it doesn't end there. I head over to the customer forum and ask if anyone else is experiencing the same, surprise surprise another customer says "hey I'm experiencing the same!" so we compare IPs, he's on the same (subnet?) IP part as me, xx.xx.xx. (where is our specific parts and xx is the same) so he then submits a support ticket about it. So specific to this incident: Support are not told when blocks are put in place, support don't proceed to contact all the other customers with the same problem when it is resolved and they don't offer any sort of "sorry" explanation. So either support doesn't have the facility to check for incidents specific to a client (why not?) or they just don't bother.

Anyway yes, that's just one incident but it was the final straw. vps.net have always been good on the customer relations side with Nick always talking to customers, but the product is poor (have a SAN die and then enjoy the wait time while it "self heals") and the support is just as bad. I'd love to pass issues off as one time, or things that will get better, but after an entire year of seeing it remain poor I'm finally moving on and it isn't just me, the customer forum is full of issues.

oh and don't even get me started on their inability to communicate, you'd think a product aimed at people with important things would have people monitoring the network and hardware, but apparently not, because it often takes at least 30 minutes for them to notify people of issues in progress via status.vps.net (which FYI a bunch of customers had to hammer them to get online, which they still don't publicise).

http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum... < A group of clients down, Managing Director says he's going to "look into it" and confirms there is an issue. He has to look into it? Don't they, you know, monitor? The problem? Licensing issue, a licensing issue took down hundreds of servers for over 4 hours? It's a joke.
http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum...
http://www.vps.net/forum/customers-forums/clients-only-forum...

Summary: Unstable/unreliable product, poor support, good customer relations, terrible issue awareness. Broken promises.

Edit: I didn't realise how long this had become, apologies. I'm just very frustrated that I've stuck with them for so long (I was considering leaving after 3 months of nothing but pain) and they still suck.

Edit edit: I figured an example of the horrible support where it caused substantial downtime would be good. Back story: Server went down, checked the client forums and many others had the same problems, after an hour Nick (MD) said via Twitter that anyone still down should contact support, so I'd already been down for an hour:

09:34 EDT Submit ticket, say that my server is still down and this ticket is as instructed via Twitter.

09:38 EDT Reply from support, "Will check this and update as soon as possible".

10:07 EDT I replied asking where my update is, explain that I've now been down for 2 hours.

10:39 EDT I finally get a reply saying that my server is queued for being brought online

11:46 EDT Server still down I ask what's going on...

13:36 EDT Still no reply, server still down.

19:40 EDT Finally a reply from the MD (Nick) saying that my server is now back online.

So as you can see, between "Your server is now queued to come online" and the MD replying, I got nothing, all the while my server was down. It's laughably bad, especially because this is one of the many terrible instances with support I've had.