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.
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.