Well, it's two topics of course but anyway here goes the small anecdote: After I spotted that servetheworld.net (Oslo, NO) had now cheaper VPS, I ordered their 96 NOK ie. 120 NOK VAT inc. ~14€ : 2 gb ram, 50 gb disk, 2tb traffic. They use Virtualizor panel and offer a couple linux distros (Debian, Suse, etc). I run OpenBSD or FreeBSD on servers. So I asked them if they could provide the iso. Was expecting an answer like "yes, we download and connect it to the virtual cdrom" or "yes we add it to the list of available OS". That's my experience with every VPS host I have/had, and the low cost ones. (Servetheworld for their prices are not cheap in general, but for Norway they are, by now). They answered by proposing a one-time fee (in the 30-some €). ??? As they use Virtualizor, which has a rescue mode ie. a mini ramlinux from where to inspect the actual vps disk in case of trouble, any OS can be installed by oneself. Most VPS customers are savvy unix users, it's kind of ridiculous to offer them to pay for something that they can anyway get by themselves. And to feed to the virtual cdrom an iso, is an easy trivial task, done graciously by all hosts I have used. Servetheworld do bill three months at once, so I just paid for the VPS with one of the default linux, logged into it, checked the network settings and the drivers. To my surprise I saw that they don't use virtio disk and network, but the ata and realtek drivers and no drivers option in Virtualizor. So OpenBSD was excluded, as its watchdog support of the realtek doesn't work with the qemu realtek, but Free BSD is ok. So I booted the VPS into the rescue mode, a debian, made room for and installed qemu, downloaded a FreeBSD iso, booted it in qemu with the vps disk associated, and installed FreeBSD to it. So done in ten minutes with my custom OS and spared the 33€.
Are there still many other VPS hosts like that: - not offering graciously any OS iso - not running VIRTIO on their KVM?
By comparison with servetheworld.net, I have a KVM with itsystem.kz (Ust-Kamenogorsk) running ispsystem panel. Similarly they didn't have virtio (so no OpenBSD), and after I simply asked them why, they replied explaining that it was a good idea and they were going to provide virtio and implement a custom iso choice in the panel...