I purchased the Plus X8 VPS package from Server4You. I chose to have the 400GB on spinning rust since I want to use this for storage space and such, as well as some tinkering.
The setup cost plus first month of hosting ran me $28 ($12 one time setup fee, and $16 monthly). Their HQ is in Germany, and their American Office and Data Center is located in St. Louis. So I paid the fee, and a few minutes later, I got the "Thanks for paying" email saying further instructions would be sent, but I never received any.
I decided to go ahead and log in to the web portal after waiting about 15 minutes and bam! I'm in. Upon login, it tells me that my server, <some random name> has not been installed yet, and provides me a link to start a restore...
I have my choice of Linux OS between CentOS 7 builds (LAMP, and minimal), a Debian 7 (LAMP, and minimal), a Debian 8 (minimal), and several Ubuntu builds in the 12.04 and 14.04 flavors. Of note, one of the Ubuntu 14.04 images has Plesk v12 pre-installed. I'm still tinkering around with CentOS, so away I go with a CentOS 7 image.
You can set your own server password, which is nice. They give you a minimum password requirements and also a recommendation to use a few symbols (such as +,-,!,?), but you cannot use $, &, <, >, /, , or %.
UPDATE: The password configured is for the root account of the server. Make sure it is a strong one, and then create a user account and disable allowing of root SSH. Check to make sure that your user account is allowed to perform SUDO before disabling root SSH, lol.
I have confirmed with them that they do not provide console access to the VMs.
I've set my password, and am currently waiting for the image to restore... after about 15 minutes (maybe less), my image was restored, and I now have root access to my server. If I were going to do my own Domain name, I'd purchase through Google Domains or GoDaddy, or whoever... However, I am simply going to make this server run as a subdomain of one I already control.
So that was my experience in a nutshell. As I have Time, I'll go back and do up a few screenshots of the control panel, etc.
UPDATE 2: Scott raised a good question about backups. The backups page looks like:
Which suggests that we can only get backups every 14 days. The 1st backup is a full, and the next 3 would be incremental.
They do give you the ability to keep up to 3 snapshots that you perform manually.
Update 3: The Server4You guys do not support docker in their VMs. I just had that confirmed by one of their support reps.
Update 4: The Server4You systems are not flat out terrible. Their memory and storage offerings are actually quite nice. However, I've had a number of problems with the performance on my system (PHP scripts taking a long time to execute, SSH taking minutes to connect, random disconnects while I am using SSH)...
The biggest problem I have is that the containerization they use doesn't allow for me to customize the system the way I want it to be done. I can't add anything that requires Kernel modules (so no FUSE environments, no Docker, etc...) that they don't have built into the Host OS kernel.
Every time I asked about a way do do something, their support team's answer was "buy a dedicated host)... Which had half the RAM and about the same storage, but was double the monthly price.
Sadly, this means I am shutting down my service with them and migrating the stuff I had running back to my house or back over to my other VPS.