Offering Linux hosting

[A. W. Wright]

I co-maintain a server with the primary purpose as a BZFlag game server
(http://bzflag.org ), our server is http://bzfx.net, and we use it to
develop a number of cool projects, the biggest is one I programmed (over
the course of three re-writes) a player and score tracker
http://bzflag.redjacket.ws. Most of the other projects I keep track of
at http://git.bzfx.net/ . It costs quite a bit of money to keep running,
and so we are looking to offer paid hosting for running applications,
web, and such, only to cover the cost plus a bit extra for upgrades. We
only need (and want) ten people being hosted at a time, for ~$8/mo. The
two of us are quite experienced Linux administrators, but some questions
remain:
Is it worth it to keep hosted applications in a Virtual Machine? We
tried Xen, but it seems to crash the server, I don't know if it has
anything to do with the processor not supporting native virtualization.
What VM software would you recommend, or are there any good
articles/books to read?
Is there any good, FOSS, domain/web/DB/mail management software?

Finally (and most importantly), what would be the best way to
advertise/offer this? Our target is at hobbyists and FOSS projects who
might be too constrained by commercial hosting, since we will install
(nearly) any software package someone might need, and any game server,
we chose the server because of it's low and equal ping times to both
Europe and the West coast. And of course, if anyone is interested, see
http://bzfx.net/hosting for the details we have come up with. :)

Austin Wright.