In fact, VPS.Net reached out to me after I wrote up my experience here. They offered 90 days of free hosting to help offset my prior experience. After making the offer they didn’t actually tell me how to take them up on it. I may ask them to reopen my account and use that credit to see if the new TKL release works better in their hosting environment.

FWIW, I remain with UnmeteredVPS.net for this site. While obviously a much small company they have been very good to deal with.

I’m guessing you came across an old blog post, because a year before that, in 2009 we tried partnering up with them to offer the first on-demand deployment for TurnKey Linux but we had to back off as soon as users started reporting the instability. I completely agree that they should have pulled back the offering until the problems were resolved and we said as much. Instead they kept advertising support for TurnKey Linux, and whenever users ran into problems they blamed us for it.

For our part, we were open about the issue and our dissatisfaction at the way it had been handled and started promoting alternative hosting providers, including Amazon EC2 which we added support for in October 2009, and which gives image developers full control of the images (helpful for debugging issues), in contrast to VPS.NET.

As you might imagine, for these reasons there currently isn’t much of a relationship between TurnKey and VPS.NET. Last time I heard of them was when they shut down our CDN provider (SimpleCDN) without warning, retroactively changed their TOS, and then blamed SoftLayer, the upstream provider which they resell. It’s an ugly business which I think they are getting sued for.

But anyhow I digress, the new TurnKey Linux 11 is out based on an entirely new Ubuntu Long Term Support release (10.04) with a new Ubuntu kernel. Assuming they update the images this will probably resolve issues even for those amongst our users who are still VPS.NET customers.

For your VPS, why don’t you check out Linode.com. I had a VPS on there for a period of time running Asterisk and it was awesome!

However, the free hosting that they provide has considerable limits on what you can do. You can only choose a theme for a limited selection they offer. You can only use the sidebar widgets that they support.

Most importantly, at the time you could not include any multimedia content of your own. You could embed a YouTube video, but not anything that wasn’t on YouTube. That same was true of audio files. Oh, yes….no use of Flash at all.

These restrictions at WordPress.com were what drove me to a paid host.