OpenVZ, who doesn’t know it? It’s been used (and abused) for many, many years in the hosting industry and it’s still out there going strong. Being a operation system-level virtualization technology, there are no hardware requirements in order to be able to run OpenVZ. OpenVZ creates virtualized environments known as containers. These containers are not completely isolated. For example, a process that runs on the guest is displayed on the host node’s ToP. This is one of the powers of OpenVZ: it’s simplicity and the fact that there’s hardly any overhead. A container has limits (like RAM or Disk), but those limits are not reserved anywhere. So, you can assign much more resources to container than you have available. That’s also one of OpenVZ’s weaknesses, it’s easily oversold. Like it or not, OpenVZ is a nice piece of technology and it’s perfect for creating a virtualized environment with hardly any overhead. But, what would you do with it as a non-provider?