[halfeatenpie]

That's a very true statement. There are things outside our control (and sometimes in it) that can result in downtime. Like a datacenter downtime event in 2013 where a road construction crew were performing maintenance and ended up cutting their fiber (the location fiber actually was didn't line up with where it was supposed to be on paper). Since then they've built another fiber connection out of the building.

In the end, what matters is how they respond to these kinds of events and issues and what actions they take to prevent those issues in the future. While I can't say for certain what issues were avoided through proactive measures, I will state that Linode has been great with setting up fixes that hopefully prevents problems in the future. DigitalOcean recently had a problem twice with their billing and control panel system going down (in addition to their API being down). They've also taken action to prevent this in the future and have been fairly open about it (one was their SFO datacenter being down if I recall correctly).

My only gripe about Vultr is that their support responses are very basic. Limited to "try again now" and "we've turned off a neighbor". Honestly I was hoping a solution that would work long-term and communication on how they're working to ensure that. DO and Linode focus on relaying that information and I feel really works with me. This is why I'm really fine with buying through them even if they're technically "twice" as expensive as Vultr. That peace of mind is really worth it.