New Virtual Servers feature surprising prices

A new Virtual Private Server (VPS) provider has entered the mix, causing a stir with incredibly low pricing. VPS Village (www.vpsvillage.com), the name of this new venture, is offering accounts starting from five US-dollars per month ($5/mo) for an account with 64mb of dedicated memory (RAM).

The VPS service by VPS Village is provided by the open-source Xen Virtualization Software. While open-source, the Xen platform has proven more expensive than other VPS solutions as it does not currently provide a method for providers to oversell resources. This is actually a good thing, as it ensures much higher levels of performance for the customer. Thus, while such low-priced solutions are already available, these better-performing, Xen-based solutions have always been more expensive, until now.

This service is a brand of parent-company GrokThis.net (www.grokthis.net), which has been in business for nearly 5 years. They too offer Xen-based VPS hosting under their own brand, under a traditional business model, with more inclusive services. Such improvements include RAID, for reliability, and backups, for peace-of-mind. The VPS Village service is thus, no-frills, lacking these features.

VPS Village however, is being treated as a separate entity by GrokThis.net who is approaching this cautiously, said president Eric Windisch: "The consequences for the market may be enormous, but it is also risky. This is a new, untested business model. We're excited to be the first."