The hardware Softlayer is offering looks ancient, Xeons from 2006, only a paltry 5GB/mo bandwidth tier as initial offering -- this page looks stuck in time, like what you could get maybe three~four years ago in dedicated hosting.
Even Cari.net, which I think prices a bit higher than others is offering more for the money. I've had several dozen machines with them since 2006 without issue, top notch support. I also use the really cheap and no-frills folks like Ubservers for when I want a bunch of disposable cheap dedicated machines. Their support is absolutely shit, but by god are they cheap and the bandwidth real. I've been through probably dozen and some change of these guys and that's really all that matters is cheap solid bandwidth and a vague sense of support.
Softlayer does have some ancient seeming hardware still available (which stupidly shows at the top of some lists), but has Xeon E5 systems too, which are fine. They actually had E5s available before general availability.
The only criticism I have of Softlayer is their RAM pricing is sometimes extortionate, but is negotiable.
Compare their budget servers against other budget servers and they're going to lose out on CPU, RAM and bandwidth tier for the price you pay. Not everyone who is cheaper is offering inferior service, either. While I am sure I could negotiate a nice deal with Softlayer, I'd rather deal with people who are offering a better value up front. But perhaps I'm biased, as I tend to provision quite a few cheap machines for ESXi farms and I don't need nor want anyone's support beyond prompt hardware replacement and their network performing as expected.
I'm a SoftLayer employee, so my perspective on this might help ... A server at SoftLayer is often more expensive than the same server at another provider, but those identical server specs don't necessarily make it an "apples to apples" comparison. When you don't need any of the free value-add functionality that differentiates a SoftLayer server (which I won't include here for fear of being "salesy"), the numbers probably won't add up. SoftLayer isn't positioned in the market to compete on price, and you're right that there are a lot of quality hosters who offer reliable, powerful servers for lower costs.
OpenVZ (because it's closer to bare metal performance), which limits it to Linux distributions currently. We've had requests for FreeBSD though, and we're adding Xen support soon which should allow that.
FreeBSD on top of Xen has limitations (such as only one virtual CPU (AFAIK)) and in my testing is really unstable. Would you consider using something like KVM instead which has less issues?
It's definitely possible. We're not wed to any particular container/virtualization system. Networking tends to be a bit of a tricky issue, but I'll definitely check out FreeBSD on KVM. Thanks for the heads up.
There's new players all the time and a lot of mom-n-pop type shops out there that actually can reliably deliver 100Mbps and 1Gbps pipes, though some are certainly shady.
I've named the ones I feel comfortable mentioning, but if you really want to know more about what's out there, there's a number of forums like Web Hosting Talk where the actual companies maintain presences to run promotional deals -- and there's a lot of public opinions aired about how said companies are doing. There's going to be some rather uninformed opinions aired, but most people can tell you when there's a real problem.
Even Cari.net, which I think prices a bit higher than others is offering more for the money. I've had several dozen machines with them since 2006 without issue, top notch support. I also use the really cheap and no-frills folks like Ubservers for when I want a bunch of disposable cheap dedicated machines. Their support is absolutely shit, but by god are they cheap and the bandwidth real. I've been through probably dozen and some change of these guys and that's really all that matters is cheap solid bandwidth and a vague sense of support.