They have different SLAs for certain issues: https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sla.xml

Does the server boot? If so, you should use http://docs.ovh.ca/en/guides-ovh-rescue.html#hardware-check which should flag it to them I believe.

If the server doesn't boot it should have been picked up by their monitoring systems (I believe this is "Level 1").

Have you tried calling them?

Yep. Even a co-located or dedicated server in a datacenter would be better than a Comcast connection (and probably cheaper) when just getting started. He could always "move up" later, when needed.

Also how is "$1 / 10GB / month" going to result in me paying "less" for online storage?

S3 is $0.02/GB, or $0.2/10GB and $2/month gets you 100GB on Google Drive.

We were not aware that these options had direct sftp access. We've used Google Drive in the past but we didn't find it to be particularly user friendly (we haven't used S3). CloudBuddy could save you some money if you have low to moderate storage needs that require sftp access.

Rsync.net has direct SFTP and rsync for $0.03/GB/month: http://rsync.net/products/attic.html

And with the quality of service I expect from a service hosted on a Comcast connection, I'd say you're roughly comparable in reliability/quality to low end VPS providers like https://www.time4vps.eu/. From them you can get a 40GB VM for $2.35/mo.