Hi everyone,
Today I decided to give some hosting companies a shot - the goal for that review was to be focused on businesses that accept Monero for a payment so I tried the two biggest I could find which are NiceVPS & Rootbox.
That analysis is supposed to be short as I'm going to describe the user experience to setup a server from the account creation to the payment.
As I was trying to setup a web server anonymously I did the whole process using Monero as the payment method. Well the least I can say is that the review was quick as my Payment with NiceVPS never went through (there is clearly a bug with their Monero processing wallet) whereas it worked from the first try with Rootbox.
The backoffice from NiceVPS looks nicer than Rootbox's where it's much more geeky but you can judge by yourself:
Vs Rootbox:
Payment
On the other hand the payment using Monero with Rootbox took less than 5 minutes whereas I've tried twice with NiceVPS (still using Monero) and apparently it never came through.
What's funny is that I reach out to NiceVPS customer support and the only positive thing I can tell is that they were pretty reactive. Appart from that they simply denied any evidence I provided stating that 'they never had any issue with payment and their Monero wallet was currently empty' but was they were not aware is that I was doing that review so I was screenshooting the whole process. But even more impressive is their denial when I told them I could provide some screenshot to prove I've been paying twice (I also offered to do the whole thing a third time) and they were not even interested in having a look to the screenshot... looks pretty dodgy if you ask me.
Bottom line is that I couldn't go through the analysis but instead I'm sharing my experience and if you're interested in setting up a web server using Monero as a payment method I would highly advise you NOT TO GO with NiceVPS as that would as well be a scam from where I stand it wouldn't make a difference (they closed the ticket without setting up the server nor proposing any refund for that matter).
So from where I stand I lost roughly $20 + a couple hours with NiceVPS and got nothing and I spent $6 with Rootbox and got a brand new VPS setup in a matter of minutes. So sure, Rootbox is quite geeky (terminal only) but it does the job and you get what you paid for!
And you, any experience using Monero for setting up a webserver?
EDIT 18/02/2018: Customer support reached out to me when they saw the two payments on their Monero wallet. They apologised about the poor customer service and credited me back $30 in compensation (only usable for paying/using their services though).