[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.