June 27, 2009 @ 12:16 am 
Via this WHT offer, Advantagecom, with claimed “uncompromising integrity in web hosting since 1998″ and “nearly 7 years of VPS hosting”, is offering some time-limited specials with recurring discount. With coupon code 6dollarstarter, you can get the following VPS:
- 256MB memory
- 21GB storage
- 5Mbit/sec unmetered bandwidth
- 1.5Ghz virtual CPU
- BlueOnyx control panel
Very good deal indeed, consider hwVPS 2009 Starter usually costs $30/month. Their website traceroute to Walla Walla in Washington.
Offer seem to have expired by now, only $30 left
Promotion expires on 30 June according to the WHT offer. Did you apply the coupon code?
Over 40 hours and still not sign of VPS being set-up. Has anyone else had to wait ?
It took 10 days for me to get my “5 day Ubuntu” VPS. They had time to send me a thank you card in the mail and invoice me for yet another month of service though!
Malcolm, do not be too picky. There are not many providers out there sending nice thank you cards!
Brendan and Malcom,
We did get a little backlogged with setups.
Brendan was setup in 8 business days and Malcom (that’s not the name he gave us) was setup in 8 business days. Yes, we were 3 days behind on Debian and Ubuntu setups due to the unexpected popularity of the offer, but we did catch up and they are now being setup in 1 business day.
As for “They had time to send me a thank you card in the mail and invoice me for yet another month of service though!”, you must consider that we are not a one man show and some departments have more time on their hands than others. Also, billing is automated and requires no manual labor at all to generate an invoice, so it is always on time.
The reason you got a second invoice 5 or 6 days after ordering is that monthly invoices are generated 25 days before their due date to allow you plenty of time to pay the bill or deal with declined/expired credit cards without service interruption.
If you contact billing@advantagecom.net they are more than willing to adjust your account for the delay in setup so that you’re only paying for days after we started your service.
Andrew, luckily you identified Malcolm in a vast sea of customers!
John,
We only had one Ubuntu hwVPS order on that promotion, so that “vast sea” didn’t encompass him. Most selected operating systems that are more popular on servers.
Only one Ubuntu order? That does seem a bit odd as I saw Ubuntu 8.04LTS or 9.04 being very popular in another VPS provider that I’ve been with (although I do prefer Debian 5 at the moment).
I canceled service with them almost two months ago and they have confirmed that it was scheduled to be terminated just over a month ago. One week after termination they invoiced me and have continued to remind me that the invoice is due and just sent me an overdue notice. Multiple attempts at contacting them have resulted in no response. This company is unresponsive and should be avoided.
Malcom,
If you give me some information that I could use to find your billing account (real name, domain name, invoice ID, or account ID), I could look into it and see where things went sideways. Unfortunately, I do not remember which account is yours. Your experience is not typical. Our regular billing person is out on maternity leave, but we do have someone filling in for her. I don’t know if that is a factor here until I can look at your actual account, though.
Our billing and notifications are automated, but cancellations require manual processing, so it could be that’s where it is hung up.
As of last week, though, all cancellations had been processed, so I think something else is happening here.
You mentioned you couldn’t get a response through multiple contact attempts. What method did you use to contact us and what dates were those contacts? I want to also look into why you haven’t gotten a response. It could be as simple as spam filtering. It is somewhat common for our billing responses sent by email to be automatically placed in the customers’ gmail junk folders because they didn’t whitelist us. This type of communication issue isn’t isolated to just our company.
At any rate, this is all speculation until I can actually look up your account.