There has never been a better time to be a web entrepreneur. Practically everyone with disposable income today is connected to the Internet, and most are hungry for new experiences. A great variety of frameworks, libraries, and services make it easier than ever to turn a great idea into a minimal viable product, so that ambitious entrepreneurs can quickly decide if there is potential in a particular concept. Providers of Linux VPS hosting make it inexpensive and incredibly easy to acquire the necessary server resources, too, so that a talented programmer can often have a prototype written and serving visitors on the Internet within the span of hours.
Virtualization is big business, too, so that those seeking such services can be assured that they are getting mature, technologically-sophisticated products. Most of today’s x86 processors include hardware-level support for operating system and program-level virtualization, so that the performance penalties previously associated with this technique have been largely mitigated. Guest operating systems now run most common tasks at performance levels approaching those of native OSes, with only sustained access to specialized hardware normally causing noticeable gaps of this sort.
While all of their products benefit from technologies of this sort, Linux VPS hosting providers offer two basic sorts of such hosting. Linux kernel-based virtual machine (or KVM) products make use of the virtualization support found in modern Linux kernels, with no additional software being needed. Products of this type tend to offer especially excellent performance, but can be less flexible than others which instead make use of discrete virtualizing software. Services based on bare-metal third party virtualization such as the Xen hypervisor or user-space software such as VMWare are also very popular, with each bringing its own advantages to the table.
While research regarding a particular application’s requirements can help developers decide which of these setups is most appropriate, in most cases, any of these will suffice for getting started. The choice of initial VPS platform will not have any development-related implications for the future as, for example, settling on particular operating system versions or libraries might. Instead, it’s best that developers looking to quickly launch an MVP for market-testing purposes simply pick a solid, reliable provider like JaguarPC for starters, and worry about these relatively more esoteric questions if and when they become important.