that's indeed not bad what will you do with it?

That's pretty cheap. If after awhile you still recommend it, I might check them out some more.

Guess what? The VPS is still up! I renewed the service for another 3 months at the same price.

I'm looking to set up another VPS with them, with higher specs:
• 55GB storage
• 550GB transfer/month
• 512MB/786MB memory
• $92 cost/year

That's like $7.67/month... but I'd never tried them for a whole year at a time. We'll see how it goes, eh?

Guaranteed/burst memory is specific to OpenVZ and other OS-level VM's. Essentially, your VM thinks it has 786MB of RAM, but only 512MB is guaranteed. If there is enough spare RAM lying around (and there often is, since not everyone maxes out), you could use up to 786MB; otherwise, you may run into memory allocation errors when you try to allocate additional RAM. It's basically a way to oversell virtual servers, but it's not nearly as bad as shared-host overselling.

Xen uses a different memory allocation strategy. You are guaranteed the advertised amount of memory, but then you also get to use a certain amount of swap. Xen tends to be more popular in some circles because it behaves more like a real server, in this respect.

Oh right. It's gotta be better than just having 512mb. You can't really run 600mb processes on it though, as you don't know whether it'll be always available.

Thanks for the explanation.

You should be able to start a 600MB process if there is enough memory at the moment. Then, if your process hangs onto the memory, somebody else might have trouble allocating extra memory

Basically put, if your vps is running at 512mb, and needs more memory, it will get a "burst" up to 786mb ram so that that ship don't sink!

Yep. Well, 786MB is the hard limit -- when you hit that point, you'd get allocation errors for sure. 512MB is the soft limit -- you might get errors beyond that point if there's not enough memory. As far as the VM is concerned, it sees 786MB of total memory at all times, since memory can't be hot-plugged. This is problematic with programs such as Java, which allocate as much as they could or die trying.

Okay guys, it's time to update this thread again. Basically, the host died. They didn't pay the rent, and the servers were shut down. I contacted Joe's Datacenter (where the VPS was hosted) and Joe personally powered up the servers long enough for me to SSH in via my old account and get at the files that I cared about. So... goodbye VPS Squad, it was good and cheap while it lasted. And thumbs up to Joe

Three cheers for Joe!  Seriously, that's a nice thing for a datacenter to do.