Your cloudiness may vary. This was the place we used to have a lot of hosted boxes with, they treat VMs much like they used to treat the hosted boxes.

We are in fact leaving them by the end of 2014, er the end of 2015, er some time in 2016. (It turns out disentangling years of encrusted dependencies is complicated.)

But in practice, Ubuntu is a perfectly good version of Debian for our purposes, so we'll probably stick with it. The devs also like it on their desktops so feel happier targeting the same thing on the server.

Could you explain why you think so?

If you support Ubuntu, it's trivial to extend that to Debian. Ubuntu is still very tightly pinned to Debian.

That's not true for the kernel, which is probably one of the most important parts for a virtual server provider, if they want the instances to run as efficiently as possible.