I was browsing several of the "low end" sites comparing various VPS deals, and I saw what looked like a great deal for a 1GB RAM VPS with 3 static IPs for $12.00/year provided by Green Value Hosting. For me, this turned out to be an excellent offer.
Background: I am VERY new to the VPS world, but I am not new to Web hosting. I've been an IT geek for over 25 years, and I have designed and managed several hobby and client Web sites since the late 90's. Yes, I have read the vast number of negative posts about GVH here and elsewhere, and yes, despite that, I took a risk. But I thought, what the Hell, for $12.00, it's a minor write-off if it fails.
Intended use: My use for these VPS instances is NOT for production use. I want to use these as simple test boxes so that I can become more adept at Linux and Ubuntu system management.
Since purchasing two instances, I have installed and re-installed CentOS and Ubuntu several times, some due to application installation issues, and others because I simply FUBAR'd the instances. In all cases, an OS re-install took just a couple minutes, and I was always back in business quickly.
My experience: So I signed up for a VPS located in Buffalo under GVH's "June VPS special 4" promo. 9 hours later, I received an information email, and I was logged in with PuTTY. Things seemed peppy, and I was very happy with the performance and responsiveness. (Sorry, no benchmarking, just simple "gut" feelings based on my frequent experiences with SSH to a DreamHost shared hosting node.) Shell and Web access was excellent in comparison.
For fun (simply because I never have done it) I installed Ubuntu desktop with VNC, and within an hour or so, I was able to effectively run a graphical session with very little delay--pretty cool in 1GB. Eventually, I decided to dump that, so I re-installed Ubuntu and installed OpenVPN. Again, in short order, I was connected with my Android phone surfing from one of the VPN's IP.
My second instance: Being satisfied, I figured that I wouldn't find a much better deal any time soon, so two days later I ordered a second VPS, this time located in Seattle. It was provisioned and available in about 11 hours. Oddly, I could not get any outbound network access, and inbound SSH was flaky and VERY sluggish. Since I live near the East Coast, I attributed it to "across the country lag", so I logged a ticket asking if they could move my instance from Seattle to their Chicago location. I guess I got lucky, because that task was completed it within 10 minutes. Interestingly, I had the same issue at that location as well. On a whim, i went to the Control Panel in Networking and selected one of the other 3 IPs as my "default" IP address. All networking issues went away, and the instance was fast and responsive--as fast as the Buffalo instance.
Service: Since I ordered these, I have logged three service tickets. The first was answered and resolved in about 6 hours, the second was resolved within 10 minutes, and I closed the third myself because I was able to quickly Google an answer.
Quirks #1: Boots & reboots: I've had several occasions where each instance was offline and it needed to be booted. I also had a couple cases where an instance had obviously rebooted because a couple services that were not set to auto-start were not running when they previously had. Not sure why this happened, but this has only happened a couple times.
Quirk #2: Possible Ubuntu template inconsistencies: I went to the Control Panel and initiated a reinstall of Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit on BOTH instances. When completed, I opened two PuTTY windows, one to the Chicago instance, and one to the Buffalo instance. I then updated, upgraded, and installed several applications identically on both. Everything worked well except for the VestaCP install on the Chicago node which seemed to hang and would never complete. This was repeatable, however I have not yet logged a ticket.
Conclusions: From what I read here and elsewhere, GVH has and continues to have issues. But recently, I can't help but wonder how many of these reported issues are people "testing" them out to see if they will fail. OK, I admit that was perfectly willing to deal with it should GVH fail me, but that was NOT my intent. I REALLY wanted to work with an inexpensive VPS. For me, my experience has been overall very good.
I also admit that I honestly don't know if I would commit to using these kinds of VPS's as production instances for me or for clients. But for my intended purposes of testing, learning, and playing around to discover what VPS's and Linux can do on the cheap, it has been well worth it with little fuss.
Of course, YMMV.
Jim