There is quite a bit of misunderstanding with different “Virtual Private Server” implementations. I figured I’d go ahead and qualify the differences for those who might be interested, in the least technical way possible, for those who just want to pay for a service and get on with their lives..

OVZ: This is one of the most common VPS offers- its’ Linux only, and you are generally stuck with an old 2.6 based kernel, as it runs your process as a sub-process beneath the host kernel. The hardware isn’t completely virtualized, and usually that is oversold. This means that your 250GB storage may run out of space when you’ve only got 40GB used, or your 8GB plan chokes with systemd’s latest ‘adding the world’ process due to a “noisy neighbor” on the same node. These are generally the cheapest offer from any provider, as the service is commonly oversold. If you don’t have much to spend, or care about building your own system- this is probably where you will want to start. Have I mentioned yet enough that this is commonly oversold?

LXC: This is a slightly different ideology than OVZ – it works more like a chroot, or in the BSD world, a “jail”. It’s not as limited as OVZ, but still locked to the same Linux based hosting. This isn’t the most common form of “stuck on Linux” hosting OVZ, but does have several advantages. LXD is a slightly more advanced container of LXC. LXE does not yet exist, LXZ is a wheel (or possibly a capacitor), and LEDE has nothing to do with it (but is awesome, regardless).

KVM: KVM is considered one of the more preferable virtualizations, as it is not commonly possible to oversell RAM-it’s directly dedicated to the vitual host process, the hardware emulation is tolerable (if sometimes slow, when not using VirtIO), and you’re not stuck with the host kernel- or even host operating system. KVM is most commonly utilized for people who want a “true” virtual machine experience, as the x86 emulation has it’s own EFI/BIOS, and so forth. It can be slow, and with it’s resource uses, is usually the most expensive option for a virtual service.

Bare Metal (Lower End): This isn’t a virtual service at all! This is usually a piece of hardware that was awesome a few years ago, but is no longer all that great. I like to use WSI for this example. If you click that link, you’ll see Atoms, Core2Duos, older AMD processors, et al. This means you have access to the entire machine to yourself- but you may be stuck with whatever they offer. I have service with WHS, but there is no console access, and they won’t do basic troubleshooting for you- if you break it, you get to keep both pieces. This is often priced similarly to higher-end KVMs, as the resources offered are similar- but it’s not a shared resource at all.

I’ve tried to place these offers in not only expense, but ones’ general gravitation as their inner SysAdmin takes over.