We are offering cloud servers i.e. stand alone servers in a cloud environment. You have complete control over the software and networking layers. So you are basically running Debian (in this case) with the same level of control that you'd have over a system installed on a dedicated server. You have full and sole root access inside your system.
Its a cloud server. You can vary its size an re-provision at will. Also, all resources are unbundled so you can tweak the RAM for example leaving other resources unchanged. You can see a video of a cloud server being deployed at http://www.youtube.com/user/CloudSigmaCH . It takes a couple of minutes.
Traditional VPS providers slice up large dedicated servers to share them between customers. Typically VPS providers use a container technology such as Virtuozzo to isolate multiple users on a single server from one another whilst running a single shared instance of the operating system. By contrast, our KVM technology enables every user to run their own isolated copy of an operating system of their choice, providing a greater choice of operating systems, higher performance, deeper configurability, and stronger isolation and security guarantees.
Typically VPS providers use a container technology such as Virtuozzo to isolate multiple users on a single server from one another
I've never seen this—I've only seen Xen-like VPSs. So, let me rephrase the question: How is this different from a Xen-like VPS provider, like Slicehost, Linode, or prgmr.com?
Do any of those providers offer you a free choice of operating systems? i.e. install any operating system you like, any version? Or control of the full server?
There is a very big difference between a VPS where the vendor places restrictions on many things and retains full root access and our cloud servers were you have total control over the software running on your server and full root access.
Put it another way, if I gave you two servers, one dedicated, one a cloud server in our cloud. If you SSHed in, you wouldn't be able to tell me which was the cloud server and which was the dedicated server based on your control of the server. That's totally different to VPS.
Essentially you are combining the control of dedicated servers with the flexibility and transparency of cloud architecture.
I don't mean to be insulting, but you don't seem to have a very good grasp of virtualization products. Providers like Linode, Slicehost, and Rimuhosting all offer Xen based virtual hosts. These hosts offer full root access and a variety of operating systems. They are indistinguishable from physical machines from an operational standpoint because they are fully virtualized environments using paravirtualization or even fully hardware enabled virtualization. You can run a CentOS VM on the same hardware as a Debian VM without issue.
This is in contrast to the Virtuozzo product you mention, which is a user-land virtualization product. The user environment appears to be distinct, but it's really a more glorified chroot-like environment. I know there are plenty of these hosts out in the market, but they're not the big players here on HN, or in the startup space.
Using the term "cloud" doesn't tell us anything about your service. HN is a highly technical crowd. In order to sell to this group, you'll need to "show your underwear", so to speak. What virtualization technology are you using? Maybe it would be better to have some of your technical staff field these questions. They might get a better response if they can talk the talk.
Do any of those providers offer you a free choice of operating systems? i.e. install any operating system you like, any version? Or control of the full server?
Yes. I find it very odd that you seemingly don't understand your competition at all.
There's no such thing as a "cloud server" that sits atop a cluster of machines and pools resources together like RAM into a single instance. VPS and Cloud Servers are identical. It's just marketing. TO THE CLOUD!
Any virtualized Linux instance boils down to a VM running on a single host server. This is true at Linode, Amazon, Rackspace Cloud Servers, etc.
Xen and KVM instantiate a virtualized kernel per VM. Virtuozzo is a container/enhanced jail and runs under the host's kernel.
Looks like Linode has Debian 6 available too: http://blog.linode.com/2011/02/08/debian-6-squeeze/