Estonian perspective: we have good local providers like Zone.ee with reasonable ticket times and no live chat. I also use Hetzner for some things.
I think in EU the consumer protection is strong enough that even cheap providers must answer eventually, so the "2x for support" premium is smaller here than maybe US. My .ee registrar has better support than some "premium" hosts I tried in US.
Regulatory environment matters for this question.
What is cheapest provider with actual good support that people here have used? I need VPS for learning, not production, but I want to experience what "good support" feels like so I know the benchmark.
From thread I see Krystal, Rackspace mentioned, but these seem expensive. Is there middle tier?
Member
For learning? Buy a cheap VPS and break things intentionally. Open tickets for things you could Google. This teaches you more about support quality than any review, and costs less than one month of "premium" host.
I did this with five providers when selecting for my business. Learned more in two weeks than in years of reading threads.
I was productive before Kubernetes and I was productive before "live chat support." In 2010 we had IRC channels with actual developers and you got answers in minutes from people who wrote the code.
Now everyone wants to sell you "support" that is just a firewall between you and anyone technical. I would pay 2x for IRC channel with engineers again. I will not pay 2x for Zendesk queue with different avatar.
This thread went from "would you pay 2x for support" to "support is unmeasurable" to "IRC was better" in 20 posts. Typical.
For the person who asked at end: yes, this was covered in first few replies. The answer is "it depends if the support is actually good, not just fast, and whether you can afford downtime." Everything else is people showing their specific setup.
I say this as someone who read entire thread before posting, which apparently is rare.
