I am also curious about this. The fact that Vultr accepts Bitcoin as payment further piques my interest. Can anyone shed some light on their performance and convenience vs. DigitalOcean?
I have, with absolutely zero problems. I recommend them often. Not sure I'd trust them with PCI compliance requirements or something that heavy but I'd certainly use them for commodity VPSes over many others. They seem to offer a lot better performance/cost than DO.
Vultr is a brand of this company -- https://www.choopa.com -- and they've been around for a while.
I've used them and love them. I did some benchmarks a while ago (standard unixbench and such) and they outperformed DO on every metric. The extra features they have (particularly custom ISOs) are also really nice.
Definitely recommend them, although I use DO exclusively for the Github student credit.
I'm a heavy Linode, DO and Vultr user. All three are great (with Linode being my preferred choice if cost isn't the overriding factor).
I've got Vultr instances in all of their EU locations and haven't had any issues (connectivity wise or uptime wise). One note for Vultr: new accounts are limited to max 5 VPS instances by default until you open a support ticket and request the limit be raised (which they were happy to do, at least for me).
I've switched from DO to Vultr back when DO did not offer FreeBSD and DO's SFO network was pretty bad. I'm back on DO now because I've got my hands on some credits, but I would switch back to Vultr when I run out. DO's SFO network has improved I think, but for the $5 plan you get 50% more memory at Vultr (512mb vs 768mb).
I've used them. Their control panel is not as pretty, and their community is not as large. But the product is arguably better, they offer things that DO doesn't offer like DYO ISO, daily backups for the same cost as DO's weekly (seriously DO, only weekly backups???), and a ton more.
I use DO and silently complain about the lack of daily backups. I don't really have a need for the other stuff, and Vultr is cheaper (when I last looked). But for some reason I always end up just using DO.
Their ANTISPAM policy is draconian, but I like their interface. I like that root passwords are in the web interface instead of going through email. Finally, their presence in more datacenters is useful for someone in the middle of the country.
I have, I found their Sydney instances to lag for seconds at a time, completely randomly, while SSH'd in (I also live in Sydney, so it's not distance). I now have an instance with Digital Ocean in Singapore and I much prefer it.
I have used them for a side project, no issues.
The big reason for me moving from DO to them that I didn't see mentioned is because they have actual private networking.
And also the option for servers with HDD instead of SSD.
Edit: Found this http://blog.due.io/2014/linode-digitalocean-and-vultr-compar..., which seems to portray it quite favorably.