Last week I needed a small VPS to test a new project so I went to Web Hosting Talk VPS offers forum to look for something really cheap, and found this deal at ServerWays.com. ServerWays is a new company, with its domain registered in December 2007. It is also a one-man shop according to this discussion thread. However it does not really matter to me as (1) it is only less than $5 per month (2) it is for a throw away project. So I clicked on the Order button for their lowest spec’ed VPS 111.

This is what you get for $4.90/month, billed monthly and no set up fee.

• 100MB guaranteed memory
• 10GB storage
• 100GB/month transfer
• OpenVZ + HyperVM

Kir Kolyshkin wrote on the OpenVZ blog, Why Virtuozzo is good for OpenVZ,

The first version of Virtuozzo was released about 6 years ago, so it is not something new. Virtuozzo costs money, and is used by big corporations for mission-critical applications. Virtuozzo customers expect it to be very stable, fast, bug-free, well documented, etc. And to sell the product successfully, those expectations must be met.

While there are many reputable companies offering SW-Soft/Virtuozzo-based VPS hostings, its open sourced sibling, OpenVZ, has much fewer hosting company supports. It has only been declared stable in late 2005, does not yet have some features available in Virtuozzo nor a GUI control panel, and it still has a reputation to build. However it works similarly to the commercial VZ so hosting companies can easily set up labs to experiment, with their existing expertise. Moreover, OpenVZ is free, open sourced and under actively development. We shall hopefully see more and more hosting companies providing affordable VPS based on the OpenVZ technology.