I made a post yesterday over at WHT http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=895047 after some of the material I’d seen posted over there by some users.
As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, I’ve been considering setting up a UK VPS recently, specifically along the unmanaged route. The user should be able to log in and reload his VPS, reboot it, and do everything himself, no management will be offered. That’s the plan at the moment anyway.
Most of my firm’s current hosting set up is offered as part of a much larger overall solution, and so selling hosting alone, and directly to a customer, is something new for me and my team.
I don’t think that there’s any great gap in the market, just space for a good solid competitor at reasonable prices. With the hardware and hosting infrastructure that we’ve built up so far, we are also in a very good position to compete, whilst offering reasonably undersold resources and premium UK bandwidth.
Notwithstanding the above, I am concerned about the sheer level of whinging that I see from some users across various forums, and it seems that a number of users agree with me in my post on WHT. I’m all for outing bad service providers – I’ve been online and in the ‘ecommerce scene’ long enough to know the difference between good service and bad service, as well as ‘scams’ and legitimate businesses – I’ve seen all the ‘you’ve won 10 million dollars from the king of Nigeria’ scams, the PayPal/CC chargebacks and every other form of scam/rip-off that there is.
What’s my real concern here? Most users that have positive experiences don’t bother posting about it, and why should they? Some do, and that’s good of them, but as a rule, most don’t. For the sake of a $20 VPS or whatever these things end up getting sold at, is it really worth seeing ‘SCAM’ appear on google when people look me up, because some disgruntled 16 year old using his father’s PayPal account didn’t get his VPS set up quick enough, or his ticket answered fast enough questioning why his VPS had been disabled after it was linked to a PayPal phishing scam?
The upside is, that we have powerful enough servers, and good bandwidth on offer, so being as familiar with the industry as I am, it seems to make perfect sense, both in terms of [small!] financial reward, as well as the personal satisfaction at seeing happy hosting users 
