On May 15th we asked our users to tell us which virtualization engine they most preferred as the basis of their cheap VPS hosting plans. After 9 days of voting and 327 unique votes, the answer is in, and the community has decidedly voted in favor of KVM virtualization.
While voting will remain open we grabbed the results as of May 24th (after 9 days of voting and 327 votes).
Recently we’ve published a number of guides about different virtualization technologies, including KVM, Xen and OpenVZ. If you are not familiar with the differences you can start by reading a broad description of the three and then continue to learn more about KVM Virtualization followed by OpenVZ Virtualization.
Check out the results below:
While it is not surprising that KVM Virtualization was the preferred hypervisor engine according to our users, what is surprising is the extent to which it led other options, including OpenVZ and Xen. Both VMWare and Hyper-V tend to be more on the enterprise side of the game, but even still, they both beat Xen. While the whole “low end box” era of cheap VPS hosting started with OpenVZ it is clear that the transition to dedicated resources and enhanced security/neighbor protections offered by KVM is well under way.
A few year ago a 2GB RAM OpenVZ VPS was very exciting — even though it would have likely been RAM oversold many times over. Today, there are no shortage of great deals available on inexpensive KVM based VPS options, many of which now offer RAM allocations in excess of 2GB for less than $10/month.
If you are shopping for a cheap KVM based VPS, check out the latest offers on LowEndBox.
There are plenty of great OpenVZ VPS offers still available, too, should you prefer it.
Thanks to everyone who took a moment to vote and share their opinion on our Preferred Virtualization Engine Poll!
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KVM is by far the most popular choice for our end-users as well. We stopped selling OpenVZ since KVM dominates.
Users simply want the better performance of dedicated RAM allocations and are willing to pay the extra dollar a month for it.
For me, it was less about KVM’s performance and more about its support for bring-your-own-OS like FreeBSD & OpenBSD that won’t run under OpenVZ. Most OpenVZ instances seem to offer more RAM/disk for the same cost so I’d be more open to considering OpenVZ hosts if I was running Linux.
RIP to Xen
Certainly seems that way, right? Less than 2%, ouch.