And you can do a LOT using such VMs, now that most are hosted on SSDs instead of spinning disks.
My take-away points are the following:
1) Beware of cheap OpenVZ offers (e.g. on LEB or WHT), performance is usually worse than offers with proper virtualization like KVM, and the need to patch OpenVZ into the kernel causes most offerings to use a more or less outdated Linux Kernel leading to a very questionable level of security.
2) If your VM hosts "serious" data, you should better make sure to do your research and use a reputable hosting provider. This may potentially cost a bit more but will save you a lot of headache in the future.
3) Unless it's just a toy project, you should look into enabling replication of your data across two or three different VPS providers. While this at most triples your performance, the reliability will increase at least tenfold.
Some companies are still offering OpenVZ because it allows to heavily oversell RAM, CPU and storage bandwidth with somewhat graceful degradation of guest performance.
I think OpenVZ has kernel patches for RHEL7's 3.10.x kernel, which is supported by Red Hat till 2024. So in theory it's possible to have a secure OpenVZ VM but in reality bad practices (like heavy overselling the hardware) flock together.
And you can do a LOT using such VMs, now that most are hosted on SSDs instead of spinning disks.
My take-away points are the following:
1) Beware of cheap OpenVZ offers (e.g. on LEB or WHT), performance is usually worse than offers with proper virtualization like KVM, and the need to patch OpenVZ into the kernel causes most offerings to use a more or less outdated Linux Kernel leading to a very questionable level of security.
2) If your VM hosts "serious" data, you should better make sure to do your research and use a reputable hosting provider. This may potentially cost a bit more but will save you a lot of headache in the future.
3) Unless it's just a toy project, you should look into enabling replication of your data across two or three different VPS providers. While this at most triples your performance, the reliability will increase at least tenfold.