If it actually takes them that much work to open the ports – adding entries to the firewall and maintaining them across updates – it makes sense that they'd charge for it. What doesn't make sense is that they do anything at all that prevents your machine from being a first-class Internet citizen to begin with.

A firewall is only important if you have ports open that the outside world shouldn't be able to touch. The vast majority of people running servers want all services to be available to the outside world; those who want to impose limits are typically those who would know how to configure the firewall (or learn how to quickly enough).

The VPS's here start off with most of the port blocked (except ssh, etc) and after a simple ticket, they unlocked all requested ports with no fee. Amazing that ;)

I used tektonic.net for a while. They had good webmin-managed VPS (and unmetered if you need that). I don't think the server ever went down and I never had any firewall problems or anything of the sort.

I can agree with this as vpsland is a pretty good host. I've used them for about a year and a half or so.. Customer service is pretty quick(usually) and they have a decent selection of operating systems to choose from..

Though, I just canceled my service due to moving and whatnot…

But.. when I do decide to get another vps, I'm probably going with http://www.linode.com/ My friend used them for a long time and they are pretty good and have some pretty nice packages.