OVH is a very large provider in Europe and yesterday, vpsbenchmarks.com started its first trial with them. We picked their second cheapest plan to begin with, VPS CLassic 2. For $7, you get 2GB and 2 CPU cores hosted with OpenVZ. OVH recommends this plan for tests and development only.
It took 35 minutes from the time of the payment to the time the VM was ready for use. 35 minutes is decent for a first purchase, however the OVH website is very unhelpful after the payment as it gives no indication about when and where the machine will be available. You're left in the dark wondering if you just got robbed until an email with IP and password gets sent.
It took between 15 minutes and a day to get answers to our support requests.
As usual we ran the setup of the system as soon as we could connect through ssh. It was the slowest setup we've experienced in a long time. Most of the slowness could probably be attributed to poor network speeds, download from archive.ubuntu.com wouldn't go over 50-60kB/sec on Sunday (speeds improved in the following days). IPv6 is enabled on the VM and some downloads would just hang apparently trying to use IPv6. Some other steps of the setup that never failed at other providers with the same OS and same versions of everything would not succeed for reasons that are still mysterious at this point.
In the end, after some manual tinkering, everything is now running. Follow the test on the OVH VPS CLasssic2 trial page.