[rarestnews]

Firstvds.ru (they have US branch at minivds.com). VPSes are never "shared", but they are on "shared" server. I.e. you have root access to your own VPS as root, nobody has access to it (1), but there are many VPSes on one physical server.

(1) ...except for the provider, but even Amazon has access to your files on EC2... (Tin-foil hat time.)

[olegp]

Looking at the Russian version of the site, you can get the same type of VPS for $4.44 a month instead of $6, although you get 25GB of traffic instead of 30.

Cloudkick should support this provider.

[listic]

The more the merier, but I would vote for http://www.prgmr.com/xen/ The guy has been doing this thing since 2005, writes here and on his blog about how he is going about setting up his servers (http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/archives.html) and writes a book about Xen (http://nostarch.com/xen.htm). The FirstVDS/MiniVDS on the other hand, go very dry official on their site, I'm not sure which virtualization technology they use and whether or not they are going out of business real soon (miniVDS forums are a ghost town).

[rarestnews]

Can't be very sure, but I think they aren't going out of business. They are very big in Russia (I have a few VPSes with them, the numbers are sequential and my IDs are around 20 000).

[listic]

But mostly I'm just excited about the coming of technologies like cloudkick which will help push cloud providers (i.e. EC2, VPS'es) into being a commodity.

[lsc]

yes. this is the way of the future... (I mean, APIs that make it easy to move from one provider to another.) without that, well, the 'cloud' will quickly become uncompetitive with dedicated servers.

Lock-in is bad for customers; long-term, lock-in can kill industries.

[rarestnews]

Not really an option for US citizens to use Russian version, I think, since all of panels will be in Russian and also you would have to pay in roubles :) /Also you do have to sign a contract in Russian with them and send it back to far east of Russia/

[listic]

I wonder what kind of virtualization technology are they using? They don't advertise it anywhere on the site. I would speculate that they use different virtualization technology for Linux and FreeBSD, because on 'BSD installed software doesn't count towards disk quota: http://minivds.com/technology/software/index.html

  Pre-installed FreeBSD OS will not occupy your VDS disk space. Our experts will update all the pre-installed software regulary.

  Pre-installed Linux OS takes up disk space allocated to your VDS. And we will not update the software - you will have to do it yourself.

[olefoo]

It sounds like jails for freebsd and either UML or some homebrew chroot system on linux.

[listic]

What are the peculiarities (if any) of this technology over virtualization like Xen or OpenVZ that most similar providers use nowadays?

[olefoo]

Jails are actually very efficient, and well understood and have been tested extensively by the freebsd project. User Mode Linux or handbuilt chroot 'jails' under linux are less efficient (binaries have to be in the chroot and cannot be run from the host filesystem). User Mode Linux is effectively a kernel and userland running under a users UID; it's one of the least efficient forms of virtualisation. Both of these solutions would fall under the class of pseudo-virtualisation, since they depend on a host filesystem and processor, and usually it's less easy to partition memory and harder to guarantee process isolation.

Xen, VMWare and Parallels are all examples of para-virtualisation, where multiple OS's share the underlying hardware, but have their own resource limits in terms of disk and memory access. And the hypervisor exists to manage the timesharing and access control, but the guest OS's are executing directly on the hardware.

From a hosting company point of view, jails on a BSD system are the most tractable and resource efficient, followed closely by any of the paravirtualisation solutions. UML as a hosting solution is kind of cheesy (it's great for networking simulations though). From a customer standpoint, a paravirtualisation solution offers more flexibility and power.

[lsc]

I've offered jails in the past (2004-2005) and currently offer Xen VPSs. Yes, Jails make more efficient use of ram and other hardware; however, Xen makes more efficient use of SysAdmin time. Now, the FreeBSD jail functionality is getting better all the time, and it's much better now than it was, but it just doesn't provide the same level of resource isolation that Xen provides.

On xen, I don't have to worry about runaway user processes. Xen deals with the problem for me. this was not the case with Jails.

So yeah. I like Jails for cooperative environments, but there is a reason why I'm selling Xen VPSs now, not FreeBSD jails, and it's not 'cause I like linux more than FreeBSD.