Review of BudgetVM

[D. Strout]

I haven't done any reviews of hosting providers lately, despite the fact that I use a lot of them. So today I am going to be reviewing one of my favorite providers: BudgetVM. Let me start by saying that my main "production" server hosting most of my websites is with them, and I completely trust them with that responsibility. I have found it to be a stable service with good prices and good support. The main VPS I have with them has the following specs:

1024MB Ram
2048MB Ram Burst
4 E5-2620 CPU Core
80GB Disk Space
3000GB Bandwidth
3 IPv4 IP Address
16 IPv6 IP Address (they will give you more for free)

I pay semi-annually, and due to an interesting sequence of events, I'm only paying $27/6 months as opposed to $4.87 as it says on the order form. I find this to be an excellent price for the specs and reliability I'm getting. The VPS has good speed due to the good specs with a gigabit link and disk speeds around 150MB/s. BudgetVM is owned by Enzu, and as the name suggests is their budget brand. Yet it still benefits from Enzu's owned IPs and good peering: they have a mix of HE, Cogent, Abovenet, and nLayer which I have found very satisfactory. Finally, the support is fairly good, with prompt (1 hour or less) responses to most of my inquiries so far.

There is one downside to BudgetVM which may have been resolved, but I can't say for sure yet. The first three VPSes I ordered from them did not have working IPv6, nor did they come with the promised 16 addresses - they only had three. I had to ticket for each one, and with one it took six days to get resolved and working. That one I got account credit for, but the rest were just a waiting game. Once IPv6 is up, it remains working fine, but I was consistently surprised that they couldn't get that working right off the bat. The most recent VPS I ordered did have it working immediately, but it too only came with three addresses. Perhaps they entered the number of addresses each plan is supposed to have incorrectly, but you'd think they'd fix that when it was pointed out (which I did, each time).

Anyway, if you don't mind waiting for IPv6, I'd recommend you give them a try. The prices are good, the support is good, and on the off chance you don't like them, they have a very nice 30-day refund policy, which I can tell you they are perfectly willing to make good on. Good stuff!

 

[nunim]

... There is one downside to BudgetVM which may have been resolved, but I can't say for sure yet. The first three VPSes I ordered from them did not have working IPv6, nor did they come with the promised 16 addresses - they only had three. I had to ticket for each one, and with one it took six days to get resolved and working....

This was my terrible experience with them, I ordered a VPS because they claimed native IPv6.  The VPS didn't come with it, I was assigned some, after waiting 24+ hours for "senior network engineer" and it didn't work at all.  They basically told me tough luck, IPv6 isn't ready yet.  

After arguing with them for a bit about advertising what they can't deliver I asked for my refund and was told it was processed.  I waited over a week (I paid via GoogleCheckout) without receiving an email in regards to the refund from Google, politely asked them if it was actually processed and was told "Yes".  

After waiting a little while longer I sent an email to Google and I got my refund email shortly afterwards.  They claim it was an issue with their billing system or what not but I asked twice for them to confirm my refund and I have seen the same thing happened to others on WHT.  

I made a WHT review (and I'm not the type to make bad reviews) about my piss poor BudgetVM experience. It's possible that their support has gotten better in the past year but I wouldn't touch BudgetVM or any Enzu brand's with a twenty foot pole.

 

[dave]

What location is your vps at?  I used to have a budgetvm in Los Angeles, and there were constant network problems.

 

[D. Strout]

What location is your vps at?  I used to have a budgetvm in Los Angeles, and there were constant network problems.

Yes, I should have mentioned this. I'm in their Chicago location, though I also have boxes with them in L.A. and Dallas, and have not had connectivity issues with either.

@nunim You're not the first person I've heard from with bad experiences at BudgetVM. It really seems to be a love/hate thing. I seem to have gotten lucky, in that my experience has been generally positive, and they have gotten their network together.