After filtering quite a number of hosters back in August this year, I've selected as home for my logger a Moldavian business1 that seemed by far saner than many. While I would normally wait for quite a lot longer to review any provider, Stanislav asked me recently about them (in #o) and so I oblige. In short for the impatient, so far my experience is this: they have been reliable and very prompt; they are willing to do the right thing although at times they need to be asked specifically (ie they will do it but you have to ask for it); they have only Intel dedicated servers (the cheapest is 49EUR /month) but with unlimited traffic (promised by them, I haven't really tested it in any way) and a reasonably stable connection. Since they seem willing and able to learn, I'll take the time to talk to them first and invite them to register a key and come by #ossasepia so that hopefully they can further answer questions and who knows - get further clients. So give this a few days please and I'll update with their response to this, either way. As for the details of my experience with them so far, read on.
The way they made it to the top of my list would be: no idiotic restrictions as far as I could tell, no idiotic requests for data that doesn't belong to them, a reasonably clear description of services offered and prompt+relevant replies to questions asked, accepting payment in BTC. Right from the start they've been very responsive (you can basically have a reasonable conversation via email with them during working hours) and reasonably accommodating, if somewhat in need of clear directions at times. I'm fine with this - from my point of view it qualifies as providing a service.
Initially I took a dedicated server on a monthly basis (for what I consider the absolute minimum initial test-period; as things worked out well, I just switched to yearly basis and so just paid the new invoice for the next year). I asked them for Gentoo on it but specifically with python 2.7 and gcc 4.9 (although it wasn't on their public list) and they replied willing to do it but from their answers it quickly transpired that they weren't all that knowledgeable about what it involves exactly. As I wanted my logger up sooner rather than later, I decided to go ahead with CentOS 6 instead, as a much more straightforward option. To their credit though, from all the signs, they would have tried to do the Gentoo, had I insisted on it (and they never said no in any form).
To get my dedicated server, there was at first a slight confusion as they have this "account" on their website and well, it wasn't quite clear what sort of "account" do I need to make a BTC payment. Happily it turned out that the account is really just for them to have where to send your invoices /group your orders rather than otherwise involved in any way with BTC payment. While I can't say I'm particularly fond of yet another account, it's at least minimal so I let it pass. As to the payment itself, they have a bit of a silly thing: they generate a new address every time you click on the "pay this invoice" button and the interface then starts a 1 hour timer for it too! Nevertheless, one email and one question later they said the sane thing - the timer doesn't matter. So now when I paid for the full year, I simply got the BTC address they gave me2 and made my payment, they waited for network confirmations and once those were in, the invoice was marked as paid and that's that. Isn't it how things should work, anyway?
Once the payment was made, they were very prompt with the delivery - iirc it was that same day or at most the day after. They sent at first the details in plain text via email and without any fingerprint of the server either but once I asked them specifically to regenerate the credentials, add the server's fingerprint and then encrypt everything (here's my public key, use it!), they did it straight away. There was some other minor issue (I can't even recall exactly what it was) that they promptly corrected when I pointed it out to them so all was well.
In terms of uptime and bandwidth, things look fine so far: there wasn't any reset of any sort, I could always connect and otherwise the logger fell down from the chans only twice in one month and one of those was after a netsplit; I already gave in chan some timings for access from the UK that compared favourably with other locations. My needs for this particular machine are not that great and so I didn't really look for anything further than the above. At any rate, if/when I need something else/more I rather expect I'll need to specifically ask them for it but if past experience is anything to go by, they will be willing to do as asked so that works for me.
Overall, my main reservation at the moment in recommending them for business is that one needs to communicate via email and to go through the un-necessary website account thing to order something from them. Hopefully though they actually want more business and so they will make it into the WoT once asked for it, so I can rate them and get them in a position where they can offer further service. Let's see how it goes, at any rate.
UPDATE 30 September 2019: Glad to say that they acted on this as promptly as on everything else - Maxim Mivo registered a key and then joined #ossasepia where he seems to have gotten a new client already.
I can't really give their name since they don't yet have an identity really, seeing how they don't have anybody with a registered key and so I can't rate them. With this as with all the rest, I'll have to ask them though, perhaps they take the sensible route and come in. Update 30/09/2019: meanwhile Maxim Mivo registered a key as CEO of MivoCloud and so I rated him. ↩
Yes, a proper 1. ↩
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And updated, as there is now an actual identity to speak of, namely the CEO of MivoCloud, maxim_mivo.
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