RapidXen provides better TCO verses OpenVZ providers

RapidXen provides better TCO due to using enterprise technology from seasoned vendors, including SGI, Dell, Supermicro and CORAID. This fusion of enterprise technology provides deep insight into compute capacity and potential problems and bottlenecks allowing them to be addressed before they become an issue. Couple this with being one of the few providers to actually have spare hardware for our entire server fleet means we have fast turnaround times on hardware replacement should they be necessary.

Don't kid yourself: downtime is a serious part of your TCO. When your servers are down, you aren't in business. Many of the large OpenVZ hosting firms have a considerably worse downtime record than we do. We strive to provide as close to 100% uptime as is possible.

RapidXen also has support for industry standards like AXML and OVF. OpenVZ providers do not have support for these technologies. In addition, RapidXen is built ontop of the industry-leading Xen hypervisor, built from the ground up to enable enterprise virtualization capabilities.

RapidXen is also ready for IPv6 in the US region with plans to have full IPv6 support in the European region as soon as Q1 2011. Our network has been dual-stack IPv4+IPv6 since day 1. On the flipside, OpenVZ providers will be scrambling for an IPv6 plan when the IPv4 address space is finally exhausted. Inaccessibility from the IPv6 internet is becoming a larger TCO issue every day.

OpenVZ providers are built based on canned software stacks like SolusVM. These stacks have not been designed for the ground up with security in mind, with integral parts running as PHP-CLI scripts! RapidXen's backend is built with security in mind exposing only an API to the frontend without invoking shell commands any place in our codebase. Direct communications with the Xen software stack ensure security.

RapidXen provides higher reliability verses OpenVZ providers

Reliability is paramount to our customers. When looking at availability, RapidXen customers have typically enjoyed fewer outages than OpenVZ customers. Rolling restarts and software upgrades are announced before they happen, and are scheduled for times of minimal impact. Unlike many of the OpenVZ hosts, this website is actually hosted on a RapidXen VPS.

OpenVZ providers are built around canned software like SolusVM and HyperVM. These stacks lack the necessary security and reliability to ensure integrity of your virtual machine. Since OpenVZ uses chroots instead of filesystem isolation, attackers can read, edit and delete your data from the host machine. There have been several instances where OpenVZ providers were completely wiped out due to a compromise of the control panel software, the most notable being VAServ. As mentioned on our TCO page, RapidXen uses an entirely custom-written software stack designed specifically for our service.

OpenVZ providers are known for overselling their service. Couple this with the way that the Linux scheduler works, and you get a recipe for disaster. It is a common misunderstanding that a server has only physical limits that can be oversold — this is not true: interactivity fairness cannot be guaranteed with process counts 8-16 times the number of CPUs in a system. This is because the scheduler is a slow path and has a partial-tree-iteration on each CPU design, with each CPU being a branch in the tree from the root runqueue. Interactivity fairness is what makes a VPS appear and behave fast and stable, so fairness guarantees are essential. RapidXen's use of Xen instead of container isolation as the virtualization method ensures that fairness is preserved at the virtualization level.

While OpenVZ's overselling ability and the choice of many providers to use cheap desktop-grade hardware allow for really cheap VPS, you have to consider whether or not OpenVZ is the right choice for you.

RapidXen provides higher flexibility verses OpenVZ providers

Kernel-level isolation for every virtual machine allows RapidXen customers to run any operating system that runs on Xen. You can run NetBSD, Linux, GNU/HURD and even Plan 9. Also, since the kernel is isolated, you can control what modules are loaded into your virtual machine's kernel unlike on OpenVZ. Select from many kernel profiles including kernels optimized by the RapidXen engineers, as well as PV-GRUB for deploying your own custom kernel!

Kernel isolation is not the only feature. RapidXen exposes a full API to it's customers which allows for white-branded reselling and more. We've even opensourced an Android application that demos the API.

RapidXen can run almost all Linux distributions without serious modification. If you don't see the distribution you want offered, contact us and we will get it set up for you. Try getting your custom distribution to work on OpenVZ — they have to be modified in order to safely boot inside a chroot.