• No artificial limits on what you can do (eg max # of domains)
• No unknown limits. Most hosting tell you you have “unlimited bandwidth” and you can host “whatever you want” except they will say later that “your application uses too much cpu” or worse, being silently throttled.
• Not having to use the programming languages they decide to support.
• You choose your distro and administration protocols/interfaces. For me SSH and SFTP are a must.
• Did I say you can get very angry with Apache HTTPD? For free!
• You choose your own monitoring/statistics stuff, backup solutions.
• You have to deal less with support staff, as there is less to support. If you ever do, probably it’s THEIR problem.

Now, there are plenty of virtualizing technologies around.  In the end it seems nobody uses anything else than Xen and OpenVZ.

I always choose Xen as you have your own kernel instance and you can customize even more.

So Xen is wonderful. But why on hell NO VPS provider let you choose your own kernel? Xen supports it by design. It’s an awesome feature. My favorite distro kernels are useable as Xen guest. Out of the box. Yet I have to use their (VPS hosting provider) kernel. I don’t like its config, its non-modularity and its origin (Ubuntu).

Ok there is no point in this post, other than I’m sad because my VPS provider somewhat sucks, (though way less than the previous one). Here is what happened. After an OS upgrade AND a forced reboot by the provider (power issues) udev no longer liked the old kernel and panicked. The VPS no longer booted, and automatically got to an emergency console (those machines, awesomely stupid yet doing the Right thing™…). If it didn’t I couldn’t get the machine back, as I can’t set kernel boot parameters. I had to hack the init scripts to make the most important devices, synced then reboot (thank you /proc/sysrq-trigger.). Now the machine somewhat runs, but still I have to call support to sort this thing out.

The point of this post? Maybe there is one. The more control you (VPS hosting provider) give to your user, the less support issues you have to handle. You can make users wait when it’s not your own fault and they don’t pay for special support.

Remember users don’t like to talk to support. Support neither I guess.

[Update]: I found a Xen VPS provider which allows custom kernels. I hope it is not the only one which does this. Anyway I think I’ll try it the next time I’ll need a VPS.

[Update 2]: Some Xen providers I found which allows custom kernels: VPS village, A2 Hosting, XenVZ. Make sure you read it by yourself, they may have changed conditions since the time of this post.