They are not as large an enterprise as DigitalOcean, by a long shot, but the upside of that is you can speak with the owner and his small staff personally and get personal service. They made me a very good deal.
I also know from their Discord that they have some conservative political leanings, so if that's a thing that matters to you either way, it's there. I don't find it to be represented in their behavior towards customers or who they choose to host, so it was acceptable to me even though I feel differently.
They are really the perfect size for me: big enough for multiple locations, R&D, and support coverage; but small enough so that you personally interact with the team, and you have trust that a random DMCA isn't going to end up with your site nuked.
The privacy-first stance (including allowing Tor exit nodes! sorely needed on independent infra!), and general willingness to help you ad-hoc (e.g. you wanna announce your own IP range? they'll do it, charge you a fair price for the work).
On the other hand, I woke up one day with my DigitalOcean droplet suspended and account banned, and support absolutely refuses to tell me why. My only suspicion is perhaps because I used the GitHub Student Pack even after I was no longer a student.
It's my view that we need this on the internet.
There's a whole community around "low-end" VPS and server hosting, and BuyVM's staff have historically been active figures in that community. The Discord is an offshoot of that. It's not all that unusual; a lot of companies do community outreach by running communities for people who do things related to their services. Digital Ocean themselves do this in another form with their documentation libraries.
BuyVM's brand relies on the perception that they are laid-back, pro-free-speech, friendly, and helpful. The Discord is a way of broadcasting that. Now, personally - I think that attracts some people I wouldn't prefer to attract. But I know they've drawn lines in the past (banning overtly anti-Semitic people, for instance), so, fair enough. Their pro-speech attitude helped me when a site I ran was subjected to bogus legal threats from an unhinged former user.
Is this an extension of the Russian Business Network, or did you miss a negation in there? :-)
I thought about it quite a bit, actually. But there is a line there and they haven't crossed it.
I had a default card set up for auto billing. That card expired. I went to remove the default card -- you cannot remove a default card. Okay. I added a new card and tried to set it as default. It didn't take. (Refreshing the browser reverted the change.)
So I tried another browser, another computer, etc. The change never took. Finally, I contacted their support. It took a ton of back and forth with people who had dubious language comprehension before I finally convinced them anything other than user error was going on... but then, instead of fixing it, they demanded I take a video and upload it for them to prove it was real!
I did, and I paid the invoice manually. The bug was eventually fixed after a month or two, but it was a pain until that happened.
I found another provider who is cheaper for the resources I need and has better customer service by miles. If I can't get you to even take my money in an easy and reliable way, I can't trust you to operate anything I rely on.