Over the past nine months I've been leasing a FreeBSD VPS (Virtual Private Server) to supplement my own hardware and I've just realized that the virtual machine hasn't caused me any (more) grey hair or other anguish in all that time. In my books vendors that save hair and brain cells deserve at least a passing mention.

At present I'm using one FreeBSD VPS for staging Python web apps and hosting a couple of pro bono sites. I quite frequently refer people to more full-service shared hosting firms such as WebFaction (even my brother has an account there) but personally I prefer managing the entire box - virtual or not - myself.

As I'd like to turn off some aging servers of my own, I'm hoping that virtualization from firms like ARP Networks, or on grander scale like Google or Amazon's cloud services, will save me spending some funds on equipment leases. I've tried a few "virtual" server providers over the years but I do believe this is the first time I've passed on a recommendation here in these pages.

What I like:

• OS support: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and most Linux distributions
• Decent multi-homed bandwidth with redundancy and plenty of peering agreements turned up; data center is in LA; quite good network access to Asia, Australia
• IPv6 support
• IP accessible / out-of-band console access
• Configure, build and install your own world and kernel if you like
• Great performance, terrific even if you measure performance per dollar. I can churn out > 1000 requests per second with a trivial test page with a single DB lookup, which is a darn sight better than some of my own ageing hardware is able to do.

What I wish they offered:

• a Canadian datacenter too!

The virtualization technology involves KVM (not Xen or OpenVZ) and I find that the resource allocation is very fair indeed. 768MB RAM / 20GB disk / 100GB bandwidth - all this and I get stability too for $20 USD a month.

There are plenty of really cheap virtual server offerings out there, but not very many stable yet inexpensive operations. ARP Networks is certainly one of the latter.

FreeBSDvps.com / OpenBSDvps.net will both lead you to ARP Networks which is the love child of Garry Dolley. Garry not only knows what he is doing, he actually appears to enjoy managing server and network hardware.

Everyone appreciates reliable hardware and networks, but I think the service offering will appeal most to those who can competently manage a server from the command line. ARP Networks' target market appears to be people who know what they are doing, which is good company to keep.