Do you guys have automatic provisioning/pro-rated billing? Do you do any shady stuff like requiring cancellations two months in advance?
We're very upfront with our cancellation policies, which is 24 hours from when your bill is due (I can't imagine companies requiring a month or two in advance, that's absurd). Our reasoning is that if the service is easy and painless to cancel, people will be more than willing to order again.
Tilaa.nl is one company does the shady two month cancellation stuff. They suck.
It seems non-Linode VPS providers either have shady cancellation/retention policies OR lack auto-provisioning/pro-rated billing.
Our pricing model based around scaling horizontally, rather than vertically. There are always different requirements for every project, and that's why I'll never say that our solution will fit everyone's needs.
It makes little sense to compare your $8.99 package to anything, but you surely know that. What is the use-case for a box with 128MB RAM in 2012? Even the cheapest VPS providers (ThrustVPS et al) start at 512MB for $5.95...
Since your packages are sliced so small, a meaningful comparison seems to start only at your "high-end" (graviton).
For $180 USD you offer 3GB Ram, 6 cores on a shared box, 8GB SSD + 400GB S-ATA disk.
I'm sorry, but for the same amount leaseweb, hetzner, OVH will happily rent me a full, unshared E5540 (passmark 9600 instead of your ~3500), 16+ GB RAM and SSD.
I've seen many different uses for the 128MB node, either as backup servers, DNS servers, small web servers (nginx works amazingly well), private BSD development boxes, small-scale proxy servers, personal VPN servers, etc. I've also seen the 1GB of SSD storage used as cache for ZFS, which results in extremely low latency reads and writes. The 128MB node was initially offered because of demand and is actually one of our higher selling services.
Unfortunately, comparing the numbers from two different company offerings doesn't give the full picture on what either of them offer. There's a lot more that's included in our pricing, and you end up paying a bit more for new, under-utilized physical servers where you can actually use all of the resources provided with great disk I/O. There are a lot of providers out there who try to cram as many people as possible on a single box, and we're simply not one of them.
I appreciate you taking the time to write out your thoughts. If you have any more concerns feel free to put them here and I will try to address them the best I can. If you would prefer to discuss them in private, email me matt[at]ssdnodes.com