You can make sure that people get a fair CPU share without resorting to such primitive (and wrong) methods.

Xen has the ability to cap CPU usage with either hard or soft caps. Most VPS companies seem to use soft caps. That way, if there are 4 instances on the box and each is doing lots of stuff, they'll each get 25%. But if 3 of the instances are mostly idle not using CPU, but one needs more CPU it will be able to use extra. It works out really nicely because it means that your usage can burst at certain times when it's unlikely that your co-habitants are similarly bursting.

See: http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#cpu-scheduling

As I note in the article, they already had placed a CPU cap on me. They could have lowered it to whatever my fair share is instead of breaking into my box and turning off my webserver.

It would have made a lot more sense for them to just pause your VPS.

They showed their lack of technical proficiency. CPU caps should be enforced without having to edit partitions, adding ssh keys to users accounts, asking for root passwords, or manually killing Apache.

So to put it bluntly they are very nice and helpful, but stupid. I wouldn't trust them with my data. But I can see how some customers might prefer them, as there is always a nice person on the other end of the line...

If you were to believe the author, his VPS wasn't causing high CPU usage.

Regardless, doesn't most vps instances have limitations built into their VPS instances? It shouldn't matter to other VPS in that box how much CPU is being used by other VPS, as long as they are within their limitations?

That was my experience with slicehost and other VPS

Except most providers grossly oversell their VPS instances just like bandwidth, and when someone actually starts using 100% of their quoted capacity, it throws everything out of equilibrium.

From bizarre reactions to imaginary CPU use problems, to hacking in to their client's servers, this article presented some good reasons not to use Rimuhosting.

That's sorta like a hotel renting a room... and if you overstay your rent, they throw you out the window. Sure it's their room, they're allowed to do anything they want with it, but I wouldn't want to be that guy thrown out the window either. There are better ways to solve the problem than using a shotgun.

Except that the need to manually deal with CPU usage shows that they are amateur idiots.

There's no reason to be assigning VPSes to particular machines in 2009 -- distribute the damn things instead of selling shared hosting like in the bad old days (except this time with VM overhead!).

Doesn't Xen do proper CPU sharing (but not proper I/O sharing, yet)? What are they using?

They are likely using Virtuozzo-based VPSs which, unlike Xen, don't properly implement resource limits.

RimuHosting provides only Xen-based VPSes.