[bradleyland]

I don't mean to be insulting, but you don't seem to have a very good grasp of virtualization products. Providers like Linode, Slicehost, and Rimuhosting all offer Xen based virtual hosts. These hosts offer full root access and a variety of operating systems. They are indistinguishable from physical machines from an operational standpoint because they are fully virtualized environments using paravirtualization or even fully hardware enabled virtualization. You can run a CentOS VM on the same hardware as a Debian VM without issue.

This is in contrast to the Virtuozzo product you mention, which is a user-land virtualization product. The user environment appears to be distinct, but it's really a more glorified chroot-like environment. I know there are plenty of these hosts out in the market, but they're not the big players here on HN, or in the startup space.

Using the term "cloud" doesn't tell us anything about your service. HN is a highly technical crowd. In order to sell to this group, you'll need to "show your underwear", so to speak. What virtualization technology are you using? Maybe it would be better to have some of your technical staff field these questions. They might get a better response if they can talk the talk.