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.

After a few minutes of googling, I have found some companies that provide OpenVZ-based VPS hosting. Please let me know if there are more providers.

I am also using a reference plan with at least 256Mb guaranteed memory to run CPanel comfortably. This is done to help comparisons.

VPSLink

VPSLink provides OpenVZ-based VPS hosting at a very affordable price. It started in late May 2006 by the same team at Spry.com who provides managed Virtuozzo-based VPS hosting. The servers are in Seattle, WA sharing the same network as Spry.com. I currently have an account at VPSLink.com (on their VPSLink3 plan) hosting my personal blog and some other sites.

They are pretty quick in setting up a VPS for you — fill up the form, fill up the billing/credit card information, submit, and your VPS will be ready in minutes. VPS are unmanaged, i.e. it comes with bare minimum installed, except you can choose their Fedora Core 5 with LAMP already installed and ready to serve websites.

I have not yet needed to contact their support, however they have an active forum with good peer-level support. So far the uptime is great, as VPSLink prefers stable kernel than the latest and greatest (mine still running 2.6.9). Although my VPSLink3 VPS account runs on a “lowly” single core Pentium 4 3.0Ghz host, it actually feels quite fast, as VPSLink ensures they are not overselling their nodes.

It comes with a good range of Linux distributions (way too many actually). It has my preferred Gentoo, also Debian, CentOS, Slackware, Fedora 3/4/5, OpenSuse and Ubuntu.

Price is great — especially if you have caught the initial 50% discount :) However in order to run a descent Gentoo VPS you’ll need at least VPSLink 3 with 256Mb as their privvmpages is set to the same as guaranteed pages.

Others

Some other OpenVPS providers that I’ve found but still need to investigate. Listed in alphabetical order.

• a2b2 Hosting — US or UK based. OpenVZ is used in their unmanaged/basic managed VPS hosting plans.
  256Mb (512Mb) | 15Gb | 200Gb | $28/month
• Brit Host Network — US and UK based OpenVZ VPS hosting. Supports CentOS, Gentoo, Fedora, Debian and OpenSuse.
  256Mb (256Mb) | 20Gb | 250Gb | £22/month
• Mabus Software — US west coast based servers that has pretty generous data transfer allowrance.
  256Mb (4Gb) | 20Gb | 500Gb | $35/month
• RapidVPS — It says Virtuozzo powered but they offer a Gentoo template which VZ does not support. From some forum discussions I suspect some of their VPS are OpenVZ powered.
  256Mb (8Gb) | 15Gb | 300Gb | $29.95/month
• Server Powered — They are a bit on the expensive side, but offers Gentoo VPS. It is really for the web hosting resellers as more “usable” plans come with multiple IP addresses and CPanel.
  256Mb (4Gb?) | 20Gb | 300Gb | $49.95/month
• SolarVPS — They offer OpenVZ based hosting for running IRC bots, which is actually more expensive then their Virtuozoo based hosting because of all that DDoS protection overhead. Also limited Linux distribution choices.
  256Mb (512Mb) | 10Gb | 200Gb | $40/month
• VeggieHost — Their unmanaged VPS plans look like OpenVZ to me as it has Gentoo as one of the OS option. Pretty good price. DC in Sterling Network in AZ.
  256Mb (512Mb) | 24Gb | 300Gb | $20.99/month

I believe there are more out there that offer OpenVZ based VPS. However many do not even advertise what technology they are using which I need to use some guess work to figure out. Neither do they rank well on search engines — I actually came up with the above list (on 2006-07-10) from 10 pages of Google search result on openvz hosting.

Please let me know if any info is incorrect, or if you know other OpenVZ-based VPS hosting providers.