I’ve been using ChunkHost for the past eight months to host my website and some minor web applications. After my short, free “beta” period I was given a 30% discount (forever) and billed like a normal customer. I’ve only had to pay $13.30 a month for a Xen VPS with 512MB RAM. This used to be pretty competitive until Linode increased the RAM for all of their VPS packages. Unfortunately for ChunkHost, this Linode RAM increase and some recent events have persuaded me to pay the extra 7 bucks to Linode. Here are the three main reasons why I’m ditching ChunkHost:

1. No way to give feedback on the service. First, let me qualify this and say that there is a “Feedback” button on the site. However, more than a quick cursory glance reveals that their feedback system is inactive **and **neglected. For example, I have an eight month old feature request that has gone ignored; not rejected, not WONTFIX’d, but ignored. Other customers have older feature requests that have been promised “shortly” and never delivered.  

   • There is no SLA (service-level agreement) or uptime guarantee. Recently, I noticed that my VM was down and the main page for ChunkHost was down as well. I emailed support about the outage and was happy to receive a quick reply.
     > Yeah, we’re looking at it now; it looks like networking oddness on one of the host machines. We’ll update Twitter with info as we have it!

     The “fix” consisted of ChunkHost rebooting the physical host my VM was on. This same problem occurred *again *5 hours later. I don’t sense any empathy from ChunkHost for bearing with them through their downtime and I certainly haven’t received any type of apology. Am I entitled to one? With the lack of an SLA, maybe not, but I’d be alot less bitter and I might have remained a customer had I received one.

   • Not enough notice given for “scheduled” maintenance. Four days before the two outages I had experienced, ChunkHost performed some scheduled maintenance. I am thankful that the maintenance occurred in off-peak hours, but I received the notice at the end of the previous day. This is not adequate notice. Had there been anything critical running on my VM, I would expect adequate notice so I could make proper arrangements ahead of time. It saddens me to think that my last eight months at ChunkHost were a waste. Fortunately, I’ve been using Linode for my “real services” for just as long and I know that I won’t be disappointed there. If you’re looking for a VM for testing and development purposes only, ChunkHost might be an option – just don’t let your development server evolve into a production server.