[canterburry]

Very interesting.

Question: Do all my 8 VSs have to reside on the same host? If the host goes down, it will take all my VSs with it. Any way of getting the same number of VSs but distributed across hosts?

[staunch]

If the hardware goes down, so do the servers (just like EC2), but they can be brought back up on new hardware rather quickly.

You can of course setup redundancy by creating multiple servers on different hardware nodes.