so the consensus is that VPS is clearly not a move up from shared hosting, that a more appropriate “move up” would be to shared but clustered servers, presumably either SAN’d or replicated content and clustered database servers? I would be concerned about complicated hosting offerings - if a hoster offered shared, shared/cluster, VPS (openVZ / Jails / Solaris Zones ie user-space virtualisation), VPS (Xen so kernel-space virtualisation) and then levels of dedicated .. can they really support all of the options?

I should say though that personally I would actually have more of an issue with someone who said they could support twenty different Windows hosting packages and twenty different Linux packages, rather than a complex mix of basically similar offerings across a *nix family (or indeed, a complex mix of Windows packages)

So does anyone have a “wishlist” for VPS hosting, or more interesting a “hatelist” for same? Views on Xen vs OpenVZ/OpenSolaris Zones? (Actually, anyone out there work for a hosting company offering Solaris Zones?)