This is a review of ChicagoVPS. I have been using them for about a year now, and was mostly happy with their service until a month ago, and then, it all went downhill. So here is my story, in the hopes that someone at the company would read it, and do something about it, or as a warning to future customers.
I had a 2GB / 2TB of bandwidth VPS with ChicagoVPS. It was hosting a few sites with total of about 700mb of files. Basically if was a few WP blogs and 2 small websites. Nothing huge. On a really good day I would get total of maybe 200 visitors, if that. However, it was an important server to me because it hosted my businesses website and name server for our domains. Everything worked great for quite a while. In fact, I did not have to do anything to the server for at least 5 months, or more. But then, about a month ago, problems started happening.
While testing my connection speed (downloading a 1GB file) the server crashed and would not come back online at all. I submitted a ticket and it took them 7 hours to fix it. When responding to my ticket, they simply said “Your VPS has been Fixed.” No explanation, nothing. When asked about it, the support person told me that “the server was stuck in network config.” Not sure what that means, but I did not press on.
About a month after that I installed an RSS reader (TT-RSS to replace my Google Reader). The reader would pull data from 4 RSS blogs about once every 15 min, no big deal. To run the update process I was running a PHP script in screen. I never, ever had a problem running TT-RSS before. However, on ChicagoVPS, the screen would mysteriously “crash” once every day, around midnight. Hmm... So I switched to a cronjob instead, having TT-RSS update it’s feeds every 15 minutes. It worked for a 2 days, and then stopped. I logged into the server and noticed that my cronjob was removed! No, not cron crashed or something, just that one job was removed from the crontab by someone or something.
I immediately contacted ChicagoVPS and asked about this. They, after taking the usual 5-8 hours to respond to a ticket, categorically denied logging into my server. Ok, so maybe there is a hacker that really, really, does not want me to get my news, and hacked into my server just for that purpose and nothing else.
Finally, today they completely shut my service down. No warning, no emails, no explanations, nothing! I contacted tech support. After 5 hours they got back to me. The tech support person told me that my server was shutdown because I reached my 2TB per month bandwidth. This is a complete and utter lie! I backup nightly all my data and logs offsite. I reviewed the logs, and there is nothing that would cause my server to use up so much bandwidth.
In any case, they demanded $10 to reset my bandwidth and get my server up and running. I needed the server up ASAP, so I told them to go ahead and charge my card and get me up and running. 2 hours later, after hearing nothing from ChicagoVPS, and not having my server up and running, I cancelled my service.
Now I am a Linode customer, and a happy one at that, for now. So, to summaries, fuck ChicagoVPS, they lie, fuck with your files, and provide really shitty service. If you can afford it, go with Linode, if not, look for something else.