My experience thusfar with PTXL is that while they sent me login info almost immediately upon registration yesterday, they didn’t actually activate that info until about 20 hours later, so I couldn’t even *buy* the thing until today.  Now, I go to buy it and find that I have to add the money to my account, then use it to buy and that I can only add money through PayPal and that they charge a fee to add money through PayPal.  This makes their advertised price deceptive, though their quarterly pricing, even with the PayPal fees, is still quite reasonable.  Once I navigated the payment mechanics, the VPS turnup was almost instant.

My experience with Budget VPS/Web Wide is a bit different.  While the Web Wide site refers you to the Budget VPS site, the Budget VPS site kicks you back to Web Wide to actually transact business.  Strange.  Account creation was essentially instant, payment via PayPal was simple (no extra fees), and almost immediately yesterday, a VPS appeared in my account panel with status “pending.”  After a few minutes of this, I went digging through their knowledge base and it was suggested that while turnup is generally quick, it may take up to 24 hours or longer and that if it’d be over 24 hours, they’d email.  I was not thrilled with this, but I’d already paid and I’m not in all that much of a rush.  I came home tonight, about 30 hours after creation, to find it still “pending” and no email from them, so I’ve filed a support ticket.

Just for comparison, RapidVPS charges what they say they charge, no extra fees, deals directly with payment, no PayPal, and account creation and turnup are both really instant, no messing around.  I’ve also been using them for a while and they don’t seem to be vanishing into the mist anytime soon.  Oh, and when I was just starting out and had a few total n00b questions, they were really nice and helpful (at no extra charge!).

Over the past few years, as I’ve moved into VPS-based hosting, I’ve also started to use my VPSes as additional DNS servers, keeping the professional hosted-DNS for geographical and connectivity diversity.  As this incident has pushed me along in making sure that every domain I host has DNS from at least two different providers, I came to the conclusion that, given that I already have one commercial DNS host (giving me three nameservers), the best economics were for me to get a super-cheap VPS to run as only a nameserver.  While not the absolute cheapest, JustGotVPS.com is probably the best price-configuration balance, especially at their cheapest ($5/mo and $8/mo) plans, and they discount for longer-term prepayment.  There’s an entry for them, as well as numerous other VPS options around the $5/mo price point at lowendbox.com.

The tradeoff for this versus a commercial DNS host (since in both instances I’m paying about $60/year) is that the commercial host gives me three diverse nameservers but limits the domains, etc., whereas running my own VPS-based nameserver gives me only one host but substantially greater flexibility.  I would also note that I chose to get a cheap VPS box from some provider other than my primary VPS provider so that my new additional nameserver would not be in the same datacenter and on the same internet links.

I also have been using EveryDNS.com, a free DNS host, for additional backup (I’ve donated since I’m using them on several domains and they seem to provide a good service), but having used GraniteCanyon and others in the past, I don’t consider a free DNS host as a serious alternative to a commercially-provided option.