Wow I can't believe I missed all these posts.

Thanks for the comments Rob!

We are actually getting a 1000mhz athlon now and Tier1 have paid for the processor to be delivered by 3 day air so that was nice of them :)

I had a long chat with the co-founder of Tier1 last night and he is pretty genuine. He used to develop helpdesk applications for fortune 500 companies and has been a perl programmer for 10 years.

I asked why he can do such cheap deals and he says that he makes nothing on hardware and makes all his profit on bandwidth. This is true from what I've seen as at rackspace adding a little ram or extra cpu to your configuration adds a lot of $$ onto the final price.

We have a 30 day money back guarantee though which is useful.

>>webhostingtalk.com has no threads containing tier1host. <<

That doesn't mean much in my opinion. Just because a company isn't well known doesn't mean they are dodgy or untrustworthy. You can often get better deals with smaller companies (and better customer support).