Hello All:
Sorry to practice necromancy, but I want to fill you in on my search
for a new VPS service provider, which I described in a thread found in
the archive here:
http://oclug.on.ca/archives/linux/2011-January/002844.html
I did promise to share my findings with the list, although I did not
expect to take three years to do it.
Since that thread, I had actually stuck with VPSVille until two weeks
ago, when my server crashed one evening and could not be restarted, or
even deleted. VPSVille has not been terribly helpful (two responses to
multiple tickets to the effect that they were looking at it) and I have
now given up on them completely. (Thank goodness for daily off-site
backups.)
A bit of desperate googling turned up OVH (http://www.ovh.com/ca/en/).
They have a datacenter in Quebec, which met my Canada-based hosting
requirement, and they were cheap. They also did a few little things I
appreciated. The Debian Wheezy that they installed was right up-to-date
with the latest security packages, they host their own Debian mirrors
for fast package installation, their web tools are pretty good, they
accept paypal, there is no long term contract and they responded to a
tech support ticket within half an hour on a Sunday night. I wish I had
a second IP, but that's not the end of the world. I've been with them
less than a week, but so far, I am pretty pleased.
I would note that they are not without some controversy, as detailed in
the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH). But Spamhaus
does not list the IP address they assigned me, so, so far so good.