[petercooper]

I'm a fan of both companies and think Brightbox and Bytemark are probably the two best British providers in this space (and a bonus they're both northern! :-)) BigV is a far newer product though and BB also has many of the features you mention (IPv6 and 'been around years' for starters).

What I'm interested in though is KVM now generally considered better than Xen? When I last looked into it a few years ago, there wasn't much in it and KVM had some key disadvantages. Is KVM now distinctly better than Xen as I'm admittedly inferring from your comparison?

[mattbee]

BigV has been running since 2011, it's only months younger, but built on expertise from our old VM platform that's 10 years older.

Xen and KVM both drew from the same code, i.e. qemu, but qemu now has all the important patches from KVM, and has featured paravirtualised I/O for years.

So I don't think the choice or virtualiser is fundamental to how you build a hosting platform any more - we could have built BigV on top of Hyper-V if we were masochistic enough ;-) and it would look the same from the outside.

One main difference between our platforms is that our storage is decoupled (but not very far) from the CPU, so you can attach up to 8 discs of different grades to your virtual machine. We can also live-migrate running machines, and running discs to keep things running, rather than just carving up individual boxes, discs & all, in our old VPS model.