I would go with Hetzner, but principle tells me not to. I was with them for about 3 months. I was talking to an account manager (or w/e the official title is) and asked them to cancel my account for a short period of time until I need to launch (and remove the server of course.) They agreed happily.
Then 3 months later, I found out they were still charging me. I forwarded them the conversation and they just kept responding with canned messages refusing to acknowledge the wrong on their part. It's a shame because they are by far the best value :-(
Just in case you don't know: there's an customer-only internal forum at http:/forum.hetzner.de/ for which you can sign up.
There's no guarantee that anyone from their staff will look at your post but even Martin Hetzner, the founder, frequents the board and occassionally answers & helps out, so that's another route to get support there.
> It's a shame because they are by far the best value :-(
If you are buying on kit/price and don't need a lot of CPU umpf then the cheaper unmanaged servers through OVH's value brand (kimsufi.co.uk/kimsufi.com) are fairly hard to beat.
I have one of there machines that acts as part one of my off-site backup sites (amongst a few other things) and it has been completely reliable over the last ~18 months.
Though I agree I'm not entirely sure how they do it! (everything on there has an extra redundant copy elsewhere anyway so if it dies unexpectedly I can recreate the content PDQ)
I assume they have a metric shed load of those boxes sat somewhere from when they were considered mid-to-high spec, and that the rack space costs next to nothing, and have absolutely everything possible completely automated (I've not needed to contact them since setup: the control panel can do everything down to a full OS rebuild, and they officially offer zero support for those cheap boxes other than in the case of hardware failure). That is the only way I can see them breaking even on the price, before accounting for the PR bonus of attracting people to look (who then take a higher spec service either straight away or later).
Then 3 months later, I found out they were still charging me. I forwarded them the conversation and they just kept responding with canned messages refusing to acknowledge the wrong on their part. It's a shame because they are by far the best value :-(