Another day, another outage with my current hosts...
The only thing stopping me switching to a new host is being confident that I can do what I want elsewhere.
I currently host at DSVR with a dedicated machine, split into a number of virtual machines (a few of which I have sold on to my customers as complete virtual servers, the rest we use to host sites on). Each virtual machine has a web admin thing (which is crap but workable) for adding new virtual hosts etc. DSVR handle all the OS patches etc and they're they only ones with root access. We have an "admin" log-on with privileges to do almost anything which doesn't compromise DSVR's ability to handle OS updates. We can, for example, install applications from source.
I'm looking for something which provides me with a similarly high level of functionality with a similarly low level of responsibility. Everywhere I look I seem to get the option of either a web front end only (eg Plesk), or full root access. I don't want root access (or, rather, I don't want the responsibility for testing and installing patches and maintaining the security of the system). I need a number of virtual hosts ranging from a few hundred MB to a few GB in size, all of which are currently adequately handled by our existing dual Xeon 2.4 system with (I think) 1GB RAM.
NB: The reason we have a dedicated server rather than a collection of virtual machines is that we previously had problems with others on the shared host causing us problems, despite that not theoretically being possible. If that's no longer an issue I'd probably prefer them just as normal virtual machines spread across multiple hosts - at least that way one dead PC doesn't mean all my clients ring me! We've never (touch wood!) had a server outage yet; the problems have all been infrastructure (today's being 9 hrs down due to a power outage), but silly things like having both our name servers on the same network bother me a lot.
OS-wise: DSVR only let us have their bastardised version of RedHat (RH9 I think), but I'm not too bothered about that. They use their own virtualisation but Xen or vmware would suit me. It's really only the need for a reliable host who manages the virtual servers without leaving me at a web front end for all config that I'm particularly fussy about.