Being the good little customer that I am, I tend to try and keep an eye on what upstream are doing. To that end I've been keeping an eye on VPS.net; UK2.net's newest business venture. I'm one of the lucky 80 or so that have gotten into the beta, and I've got to say, I'm really impressed with what the guys have put together so far.

Basically what they're providing is a fault tolerant, brilliantly easy to use virtual server infrastructure, based on Linux and Xen. Unlike most other (more traditional) VPS providers you simply don't buy a VPS and then manage it, you actually buy “nodes” or “slices” (they're actually refered to as both terms in the web interface at present), which you then assign to various virtual servers in any fashion you want, with the ability to reassign at a later date should things change.

There are a few cool things about the whole setup:

I'd love to see how things fare as the product launches, and it gets busier, but so far I'd be pretty happy to convert my physical server to a virtual VPS.net instance, should the circumstances arise.