Some think the Virtual Private Server isn’t all that it can be. Web hosting customers have an exciting alternative in store.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology holds great potential and huge advantages over shared Web hosting. But some think VPS isn’t all that it can be, and that it hasn’t been able to truly take off in popularity. One company thinks it’s time for something new.

Lxlabs, a software solutions company for Web hosts, claims to have discovered an answer to some of the drawbacks currently facing VPS. The company recently unveiled HostInABox, which they say will revolutionize the Web hosting industry. The new VPS platform uses only 15 MB on boot up, and is available for less than $10/month – making it one of the most affordable and efficient solutions out there.

TopHosts spoke to K.T. Ligesh, CTO of Lxlabs, and asked what’s behind HostInABox’s development and how it might make VPS more affordable to Web hosting customers, vendors and resellers alike.

Lxlabs’ ultimate company objective is to drive the adoption of virtualization and to make Web hosting possible for everyone. VPS’ current shortcomings inspired them to come up with the new platform and, according to Ligesh, HostInABox is turning out to be a step in the right direction.

“The feedback has been nothing short of ecstatic. I mean, no one ever thought such a thing would be possible, with all our competitors needing 512 MB to run even basic websites,” Ligesh said. “A 23 MB VPS that was feature complete has blown everyone away.”

Although mainstream VPS services continue to grow in popularity, HostInABox deals with a serious downside to the technology. The problem – one of the main reasons preventing mass scale adoption of VPS solutions according to Ligesh – is the minimum memory barrier, where a minimum of 256 MB exists to run even a couple of websites. This leads to heavy ram, hard disk requirements and more overhead costs, which leads to a higher cost of entry for VPS solutions.

With an idling memory of 9 MB RSS, 15 MB of memory usage on boot-up and 25 MB of run time usage, HostInABox is a platform without heavy memory requirements and represents a more affordable VPS hosting solution.

David Andrews, Sr.Product Manager for Web host Dotster, one of the world’s largest domain name registrars, told TopHosts he’s currently unsure of the new product but thinks it holds potential.

“If HostInABox is a new lightweight virtualization technology that combines a lightweight control panel, there’s a possibility it could make inroads into the VPS market,” Andrews said.

Andrews expressed satisfaction with Dotster’s current VPS offer, which runs on Virtuozzo, an industry leading virtualization product that he says is “incredibly stable.” Along with the feature-rich Plesk control panel offered within their VPS plans, Andrews says customers remain happy with their virtualized server solutions. He is confident in VPS’ abilities, and says it’s a far superior way of hosting over traditional shared plans. He suggests it will continue to grow in popularity as an alternative to high-end shared hosting and, with its low price point, eat away at the expensive dedicated server hosting market.

But Ligesh feels HostInABox can bring even more affordability and convenience to the VPS Web hosting world. HostInABox, bundled free with their virtualization manager hyperVM, is based on pure-ftpd, djbdns and lighttpd, a secure, fast, flexible Web server powering over 1.4 million sites. It also runs on Lxlabs’ memory optimized control panel, Lxadmin – an exciting new addition to VPS. “VPS hosting has been here for now more than 4 years, and yet, not a single control panel has even bothered to come up with a memory optimized version,” Ligesh said.