$15/year? is it an OpenVZ (advanced chroot jail) VPS?
That's an interesting counterpoint to this discussion; advanced chroot jail hosts are still cheaper than Xen hosts, and OpenVZ (the common advanced chroot jail software on linux) is in between shared hosting and full virtualization with regards to how many resources are shared and how much host sysadmin effort is required.
With OpenVZ, all users share a kernel and share swap and pagecache; you can fit more OpenVZ guests on a particular bit of hardware than Xen guests, and generally speaking, more host sysadmin involvement is required when running an OpenVZ vs. a xen or kvm host.
The interesting part of the xen/OpenVZ dichotomy is that it goes the other direction; so far the market price for OpenVZ guests is much lower than the market price for Xen guests; OpenVZ mostly occupies the very low end of the VPS market.
> $15/year? is it an OpenVZ (advanced chroot jail) VPS?
As far as I can tell (from the kernel name), it is OpenVZ. I only discovered that last night, coincidentally.
It is tiny, only 256MB, bursting to 512MB, of RAM. But at that price it is fine for my needs; I even get my own static IP address (the full cost of the VPS is cheaper than just adding a static IP address on my shared site!).
I was reading up on OpenVZ vs Xen or KVM last night, and I take on board your comments above. The virtual server market seems to be transitioning right now, with pricing yet to settle down within a common range like they were a few years ago.
yeah, at $15/year, you are getting quite a steal, OpenVZ or not. for a 256M xen VPS I charge $76.80. Heck. even if your provider is being heavy on the swap (my understanding is that OpenVZ 'RAM' numbers include swap, while under Xen, I give you ram, and you can add swap if you like, so when directly comparing OpenVZ and Xen guests, you should compare a xen guest with less ram to an OpenVZ guest with more.) and you are only getting 128M of actual ram I'm charging you $57.60 for that, and you haven't said, but if they are following industry norms they are giving you more disk than I am, and I primarily compete on price; I'm fairly low-end. Did you get a special? or is that the sort of thing you can order every day?
It was a special, but one that they offer regularly, in the sense that every so often they offer say 1,000 of them until the offer is filled up. Then it is closed off until the next round.
That's an interesting counterpoint to this discussion; advanced chroot jail hosts are still cheaper than Xen hosts, and OpenVZ (the common advanced chroot jail software on linux) is in between shared hosting and full virtualization with regards to how many resources are shared and how much host sysadmin effort is required.
With OpenVZ, all users share a kernel and share swap and pagecache; you can fit more OpenVZ guests on a particular bit of hardware than Xen guests, and generally speaking, more host sysadmin involvement is required when running an OpenVZ vs. a xen or kvm host.
The interesting part of the xen/OpenVZ dichotomy is that it goes the other direction; so far the market price for OpenVZ guests is much lower than the market price for Xen guests; OpenVZ mostly occupies the very low end of the VPS market.