You'd need seven "bad" neighbors for this to be the case.

You're right but in this case the user is a freeloader.

He can use more than his 1/8 share of CPU time but others can't use his 1/8 share.

Who cares? He should only be using the other 7/8s when nobody else is; that's the entire point. If their virtualization isn't setup to keep people from bogarting resources on a "first come, first keep" basis, that is their poor decision to live with; they shouldn't be taking it out on customers by killing processes and so on.

A VPS host shouldn't be asking or telling customers to manage their own CPU resources, period; that's the point of a VPS in the first place. It's a virtual private server. It should be isolated in a fashion such that even if I'm using 100% CPU 24/7, it doesn't affect anybody else. If a host told me to "use less CPU" I'd tell them to "acquire better virtualization" and find a better host. Ridiculous.

I agree but you should not be using a VPS if you are a high CPU user. You use a dedicated server for that.

Most shared providers will charge you more if you use more CPU or require that you upgrade to a dedicated server. I'm pretty sure that any hosting company will be happy to lose you as a customer if your usage degrades the other users performance.

Being able to use up to your share of a VPS is why you pay for a VPS and not shared hosting. If you pay for 1/8th of a server you are entitled to use 100% of that quota 24/7/365. Using your resources doesn't "degrade" other customers' performance unless the server is set up incorrectly. As long as they can access their 1/8th everyone should be happy.

> If there are 8 VPS on a machine

There's probably 64 or 128 VPS on one machine.

> and I'm always using 1/8 of CPU time

There's your problem right there. You're believing what you're told by someone selling shared access to a finite resource.

My perception is that VPS aren't for high-CPU, high-IO or high-memory servers. If one user is using too much CPU, he should be using a dedicated server. It's not like servers are expensive. You can get an entry level box on a fat pipe for 67$ with iweb.ca.

I think rimu was right to limit his CPU share. It was unprofessional of them to root his box and shutdown apache, but it seems he was a user with an history of high CPU utilization.

Wouldn't it have just made more sense to just further limit his CPU share? Even if he was abusing the service, I don't feel their actions were justified. Especially since they state in their email to him that if they cap the CPU then they don't care how much of his CPU share that he uses.