Compare their budget servers against other budget servers and they're going to lose out on CPU, RAM and bandwidth tier for the price you pay. Not everyone who is cheaper is offering inferior service, either. While I am sure I could negotiate a nice deal with Softlayer, I'd rather deal with people who are offering a better value up front. But perhaps I'm biased, as I tend to provision quite a few cheap machines for ESXi farms and I don't need nor want anyone's support beyond prompt hardware replacement and their network performing as expected.