ServInt
A lot of ServInt customers have been leaving during the past year or two. There have been quite a few complaints about the support quality and time dropping off. I'm not fond of their company attitude, which is why I've never wanted to use them. I see it as a smug frat-boy environment. Several hosting owners have mentioned this to me in private as well. (Hint: Look carefully at everything they write. We, us, our. Not you, the customer!) It's just not the same great hosting company that it once was. I'd avoid that if I were you.
LiquidWeb
I'd be highly surprised to see legitimate
LiquidWeb complaints. We met at WHT -- a site that is power by multiple LiquidWeb servers. In fact, as far as I know, all of iNet is power by LiquidWeb servers. iNet is pretty large, and runs at least a half dozen popular forums. And there are rarely any errors with that forum; ones that aren't admin-caused anyway (they are always tinkering over there!)
One of the LiquidWeb managers actually called me yesterday -- no idea what he wants, and I've not had the time to return his call yet. No, how many hosts actually call you to see how things are? I can name very, very few that care this much! LiquidWeb is like the North American version of
EuroVPS, which has been our primary host for almost 8 years now. The reason is the uptime, high-end hardware, and fast+effective tech support. (We use LW off and on, as needed. Same for Futurehosting. Both a premium hosts.)
Site5
Migrations may be an admin-level task, and not something for general overnight tech support. So you're need to wait until the 9-5 crew arrives, and they'd address it that day. Most hosts do not consider migrations to be a 24/7 support task, and do it in batches during normal hours. That's very likely the issue. Had you ask something else, it likely would have been addressed within 15-30 minutes.
If you're just really that unhappy already, not much that I can say will matter here. All I can say it that Site5 is a good host, and we use them currently for a two-VPS project (unmanaged). But it's also pricier than LiquidWeb for managed hosting services.
Xen vs. Virtuozzo
Xen really is better than Virtuozzo or OpenVZ. KVM, Hyper-V and VMware are also good. When our VPS were Virtuozzo and OpenVZ, there were constant node issues. Understand that I've used shared and dedicated hosting since the 90s, but only started with VPS around 2006/2007. Why? Well, VPS was terrible before that.
Back then, OpenVZ/Virtuozzo was the only choice. It had a lot of issues in 2006 ... just as it does in 2014. It's the virtualization style of the previous decade.
The biggest difference was the true resource isolation now possible with the newer methods. But some hosts still use those older methods, as it allows them to oversell VPS nodes.
Overselling shared hosting is fine (it's
overloading servers that's the problem), but overselling VPS is crappy. And all hosts oversell. Anybody that says they're not is either lying, or they don't understand the concept of overselling. Either way, I'd avoid that host.
If you use Virtuzzo or OpenVZ, understand that it's a question of when the problems will happen -- not if.
We switched off of Virtuozzo entirely a few years ago. Since then, the number of VPS problems has been nearly zero. And some of those were at the same host, too! It's wasn't the host. In fact, Virtuozzo bugs are why several higher-end hosts -- including both LiquidWeb and
EuroVPS -- switched to Xen.
Why better hosts like
Knownhost, Futurehosting and
WiredTree continue to use old technology is a mystery. I can only assume their bottom lines are better because of it. (Although I question that as well, because Parallels licensing surely exceeds the end costs of Xen, and possible even hardware-specific KVM and VMware.)
Namecheap is another excellent Xen VPS provider. We use them long-term, and it powers part of this domain. They have plans that are nearly identical to the Site5 plans.
Knownhost
If you still want Virtuozzo, then
Knownhost.com and Futurehosting.com are best. They're direct competitors, also FH has evolved in recent years, and is now what we call a premium host. The criteria on this isn't published yet, otherwise it'd be a great for you. But when it comes to the normal VPS packages, they're pretty much the same.
I'd used Knownhost in the past -- I forget which project it was now -- and they were fine for the temporary needs of the project. (I prefer Xen for long-term projects; less issues as I'd mentioned above.)
We used Futurehosting for years. I wrote Vik just yesterday (owner) to see how thing are. Been some months since we last spoke.
Location
There days, lots of hosts act as if one same-continent location is better than the other. But it's just desperate BS marketing. This trend started maybe 2-3 years ago at most, and it mostly originates at WHT. (Lots of amateur "hosts are there, and that was how hosts would circumvent the "useless post for to show signatures" rule. That's all it is.)
The typical difference between cities within the U.S., or cities in EU, is a dozen milliseconds. Two at most. In other words, no difference at all. (Your ISP has bigger variation the 25ms -- call them. You be surprised! Many don't consider latency a problem until it gets to 500ms!) So all of North America is virtually the same, as far as latency is concerned.
So unless you're using a VPS/dedicated to run specialty apps, like WoW-type games or stock trading programs (NOT web sites!), east coast versus central (or even west coast) doesn't make any difference.
The only reason to get a east coast VPS is to reach certain non-USA locations. You'd use Florida to reach South America quicker, and you'd use the upper east coast (North Carolina, NY, NJ, Philly) to reach Europe. Our primary demographic is actually the USA for this site, but we choose to host in Amsterdam anyway. The AMS-IX is extremely well-peered to the east coast, New York especially, and site speed has never been an issue for us. Even within the USA, using Pingdom, this site is usually faster than 90% than average. It's really the server that matters most -- not always distance. It also has the side effect of making it relatively fast to Asia, since we have a lot of legitimate Indian/nearby readership.
This all used to be common knowledge. Sadly, now, it's a little known fact -- especially if you only read WHT for info. Good site, but still lopsided with the facts.
... and I think that addresses everything.
