All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Can you explain why Openvz is now considered 'worthless' and should I avoid providers still using it
user3028938
Member
I was away from using vps/hosting for a year or two and suddenly when I come back to LET people are saying Openvz, that was the defacto cheap vehicle for vpses, is dead and told the KVM is suddenly the only game in town.
I am quite familiar with using KVM on linux for personal vms but no idea why it suddenly become the leader for commercial providers.
So what happened to make such a dramatic shift in such a short space of time? I know 1 year+ is not short in computer technology terms but I am shocked how Openvz went off and out of favor like a light switch since I last was looking for a VPS.
I just went on Gullo's hosting, which seems generally well regarded around here, and saw they are still offering Openvz plans. Does this mean I should not get a plan using openvz? Their KVM are far more expensive, and from what I recall that is also the case with other providers in general, that KVM is more expensive for...reasons...which I have forgotten. 
So please clue me in, and whether I should avoid the Openvz which seem better value or is it still ok? I am lost in this new landscape!
Comments
Improvements in KVM over time allowed it to better share resources than it used to. Combine that with the same hardware budget buys a larger node than it did a decade ago, and you have the perfect recipe for people no longer wanting to pay for the limitations of VZ. With it being possible to sell KVM VPS for so little now, VZ can't compete as well as it used to. Now the operating cost on the low end is more about IPv4 and payment gateway fees, neither can overcome that so the low end price stabilized quite a bit between the two.
Development has stagnated, it stuck on old kernels, the community is pretty much dead. OpenVZ has been out of the game far longer then 1-2 years, I would say it started over 10 years ago.
The last release was a decade ago, should tell you something.
KVM became better overtime, and price is almost the same level as VZ. With the limitation of VZ and their stagnation in development, it's not worth to grab VZ VPS anymore.
Ok, so with those things mentioned, should I avoid Gullo hosting's, or any other provider for that matter, still offering it?
I do like sticking in the past if it ain't broke. I would still live in the 90s for the rest of my life if it was possible,
but alas not.
Why would Gullo still be offering, who is well regarded here? if it is so bad?
The only reason there ever was (imo) to submit to using openvz was price. That reason sailed years ago.
I think the most recent kernel version you can get on OpenVZ is like 3.x (which is very outdated btw). Some modern programs won't even run on such old kernel. It's not like OVZ was deprecated last year, I read some ancient articles and it looks like Proxmox replaced it in version 3.4 (year 2015). Additionally, right around that time, Docker was gaining a lot of popularity and achieved similar purpose with more modern tooling.
Most sane hosts switched to LXC for providing containers nowadays.
And KVM is of course the best for virtualization.
LXC > OpenVZ. Plus, OpenVZ was just a push towards Virtuozzo (ala "Proper virtualization").
Something created for "profitability maximization" idea is never good for users...
I just wouldn't buy an OpenVZ VPS.
I think I recall a comment on an earlier post of mine that KVM is more expensive, or maybe not KVM but that you are paying for IPv4 now, @jar noted above, rather than the server architecture technology?
tl;dr just tell me which vps to buy, lol, up to $5 per month budget small server, for personal proxy use mainly. Want one less likely to deadpool in a few weeks.
As an open-source advocate myself it certainly does seem better from that perspective.
Btw what is the problem with ipv6 again? Is it just lack of current adoption over the wider internet - so compatibility issues rather than inherent problems with ipv6? I believe that was what it was from what I recall when researching last time and why I was going to go with ipv4 if wanting to host a forum on the server sometime in the future.
Just go with something like OVH, they will give you a 4core/8gb/75gb VPS for 4 euro/month. (only 400mbps but unlimited traffic) if you are afraid of the provider deadpooling. Otherwise there are a lot of pretty reliable providers here providing cheaper boxes
OpenVZ shares the host machines kernel. It's like a glorified docker container, but it reduces the overhead of each VPS. With KVM you run your own kernel.
Years ago, OpenVZ made more sense to provide LE VPS hosting. You could do more with less RAM/CPU. But it's more of a virtual shared server.
IPv6 is fine, the demand just isn't there. Upgrading to IPv6 supported infrastructure is expensive, and for what? We may of "ran out" of IPv4's a decade ago, but they're still cheap and readily available.
Wtf. Where do you live? Go to LIR section of the forum and look at the prices. IPv4 is priced like gold.
Hosteroid has some special plans with decent specs for as low as 18 EUR/y. KVM virtualization, IPv4 and IPv6 support with no NAT. They've been around since 2018. @Hosteroid
Greencloud also promo plans from $25/y. Greencloud has been around for over 12 years. KVM virtualization, IPv4 and IPv6 support with no NAT as well. Although they are some limitations with their promo plans I think (like no refunds), so you may consider others. @NDTN
Racknerd seems to still be running Black Friday sale which lists VPS servers from $11/y. They have been around since 2019 and I don't think they would deadpool (if they did, approx half of Nodeseek would collapse
).
IPv4 only on this one (no IPv6). @dustinc
racknerd probably.
I understand why OpenVZ is dead, but I also haven't seen any providers offering any LXC vps instead.
i thought lxc is worse
OpenVZ 7 End of Maintenance: 17 months ago.
Countdown to OpenVZ 7 End of Life: 12 months.
More information: Virtuozzo Product Lifecycle Policy.
If it's OpenVZ, you should look at https://wiki.openvz.org/Releases
Virtuozzo is the commercial branch of OpenVZ, they are similar but not the same. There are way newer versions of Virtuozzo, latest one released in 2024.
How so?
ZappieHost do LXC
OpenVZ used to be popular since you could easily oversubscribe resources. This was useful in the early 2010s when servers were expensive.
While RAM is super-expensive now, for years it got cheaper. This made it easier to use KVM. That combined with Docker's rise meant KVM became a standard among LET providers. DigitalOcean was also aggressive during the early-to-mid 2010s which pushed LET hosts to KVM.
Now, very few people use anything else, outside of AWS (Xen) and Azure (Hyper-V). Compare that to the early 2010s where we had even overpriced hosts like Media Temple refusing to use KVM/Xen.
I thought Docker would mean we'd have thin container hosts versus hypervisor hosts. I know Joyent did it (until they left the market and became a part of Samsung's IT department), but Joyent never took off.
I'm curious what an openvz VPS uses for a firewall. The lack of kernel modules broke firewalls and unless you monitor your VPS, you may not realize it.
I can't think of any reason to still be using OVZ in 2026, so I canceled my last OpenVZ VPS.
Hi,
there is nothing wrong with openVZ, except that its stuck on kernel version 3 and based on the good old redhat 7 -- with all its consequences ( lack of features/maintenance from upstream/security ).
It totally depends on what you want to run actually. You can ask your favorite search engine / AI for the differences between lxc and openvz and software virtualization ( like lxc/openvz ) and hardware virtualization ( like KVM ).
If you do not need all this advantages then why paying more?
From the hoster perspective using softwarevirtualization/container always means to be able to pack more instances on the same hardware compared to hardware virtualization while it offers less maintenance features ( no reliable live migration was for example for us the reason to remove LXC from our portfolio ). Also KVM as hardwarevirtualization offers basically the feeling of real physical hardware and is in this way more easy to handle for customers as they dont need to take care of any technical restrictions that exist in software virtualizations by nature. So less support for the hoster to explain to "not so well technically skilled" customers what they actually bought and why their project is not working as expected.
For me personally, if a hoster is still offering openVZ its either means that he is paying for it using the commercial virtuozzo suite which is a good sign in general ( but usually not compatible with small prices ) or he is riding a dead horse and making money with it until everything finally completely explodes which is not a so good sign in general.
So aiming for something LXC based, if you have the choice budget-wise, might be a better option in general.
Sometimes I wish Hosteroid can offer single core VMs with one gig of RAM, but with more monthly transfer.
I have one with 4.19 but that's still ancient by today's standards. There is also a branch for 5.14 in the git repo but that's still super old and the last commit was 3 years ago.
I'm also still using the 4.19 on the OVZ from tnahosting. It's rarely used and mainly for storage and backup, no major problems so far.
Oh yea, forgot about them, thanks. Well I see the name come up regularly but didn't fit them into the equation. I remember I used them maybe a decade or more ago and found them fine and thought it was good pricing for what I got from what I recall.
What would be your 'pretty reliable' picks for comparison?
Enzonix only lasted me about 3 months and sold off out of the blue lol. I think the shortest time from a LET purchase has been like 48 hours and had to argue and harass them to give me back the crypto payment and they first tried giving me only a partial refund then bugged them and got the whole thing finally. I consider that lucky as often times companies will 'exit scam' and just stop responding.