In all honesty what you’re after is a PV virtual machine (almost all OpenVZ based) – which means a shared kernel – the same as Amazon EC2. I’ve got one in the USA for tunnelling through to watch the US version of Netflix on my UK account (it has 5x the amount of content). Check out these guys for good deals:

Low End Box – Cheap VPS Hosting Providers Listing & Reviews

The average is £5/month (paypal subscription so cancel at any time) for a box with 2GB and ~30GB storage. I currently use WeLoveServers:

WeLoveServers – $9/Quarter 840MB OpenVZ VPS in LA, Dallas, Buffalo & Frankfurt – Low End Box

Box has been stable and the throughput ain’t bad. Their support guys were good too – I asked if they could load the TUN module into the host kernel for me and they did without asking any questions (which ironically now has a mention in their sales pitch). You can get UK based hosts though, so it depends on your target audience really.

They all mostly take around 10 minutes to provision your VM – because its all automated (also why its so cheap). Which is nice as if one is shit, you’d wasted a fiver and 10 minutes of your life, but that’s it.

The point is these are cheap and cheerful but do the job. Watch out for ‘summer hosts’ which are guys after a quick buck then shut down after a few months – hence ensure you use paypal so you’re in control of the subscription.

You’ll find a common trait with most of these. They use WHMCS for billing and OpenVZ for the PV VM’s – this means their Control Panels look mostly the same. They likely rent the hardware and network infrastructure from someone like Softlayer. That isn’t a bad thing – just means anyone can start a hosting company these days, hence the competitively low pricing.

Regarding your comment RE Ubuntu 12.04 kernel – I’ve never seen this and we (work) have around 350 boxes. Mind you none are running on ancient hardware… 🙂 ACPI is for handling calls for power control – such as power off with ATX PSUs etc.. what you’re after is a non SMP kernel if your CPU has a single core. Shouldn’t matter though – it should be rock solid. Most likely cause is a kernel driver for a particular bit of hardware in the box.

In case you’re curious I host the other forum & icecast on an HVM based virtual machine in the UK (at work).. which is a whole other kettle of fish in terms of VMs. I’ve got a couple shoutcast servers running on there too so firing up another isn’t a problem.