> Linode is great, EC2 is great, and there are several other providers.
What are some of the others?
What are some of the others?
Rackspace, HP Cloud, VPS.NET, Gandi, RIMU, Slicehost (back in the day), Webbynode, Liquidweb, StormOnDemand (though a part of Liquidweb), Burst.net, PowerVPS, FDC Servers, ...
List could go on. I usually look for whether they have an established history, a site that doesn't look like a crappy overused template, a real physical address, WHOIS info on the domain, Google them and research, whether they have a real status site, maybe lookup if they have an ARIN number, traceroute to their site, etc.
The last two.
OpenVZ is more OS virtualization, there is less isolation between instances.
OpenVZ usually has "guaranteed CPU/RAM" and "burst CPU/RAM", while KVM always gives you what its assigned. The guaranteed/burst is typically BS. More often these budget providers like OpenVZ because you get greater density, which means more noisy neighbor and taxed resources like disk IO.