FreeBSD losing market share?

[Jay West]

Tony wrote...
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I'm a bit alarmed by the fact that none of the major low-cost Xen VPS-based
hosting providers in the modern web development
scene<http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts/rails3> (Rackspace,
Linode, SliceHost, Webbynode etc.) offer FreeBSD hosting. Sure there are
some that offer dedicated servers like M5 Hosting, RootBSD, Pair etc. but
those are hard to find and ridiculously expensive.

Why doesn't FreeBSD support Xen?
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One could also ask why Xen doesn't support FreeBSD ;)

I've been a loyal FreeBSD zealot for decades and I still am. However, I have
to admit, there are two severe shortcomings - not all entirely freebsd's
fault - that keep it out of Xen hosting (and some other high end)
environments. The answer is:

1) No true clustered filesystem (GFS for one example). Takes it out of the
running completely for those environments. Hast is a wonderful step in the
right direction, but really not the answer.
2) Xen - Xen-Tools have not been supported on FreeBSD to this day. Without
it, there's little sense in running FreeBSD in a commercial hosting
environment under XenServer. No live migration, and half the other nice
features aren't available.

If Xen-tools was supported in FreeBSD, I'm sure you'd see it popping up as a
guest in XenServer hosting providers.

J