If you have been around hosting for a while you remember Jelastic: the Java-first PaaS with cloudlets, automatic vertical scaling and a topology wizard. Virtuozzo bought it in 2021 and it is now sold as Virtuozzo Application Platform (the docs also call it Virtuozzo Application Management). It is a serious product with a decade of engineering behind it. It is also priced and sized for hosting providers and enterprises, which is exactly the gap dockxo is built to fill.
This post compares the two honestly. Where Virtuozzo does something dockxo does not, we say so.
What each one is
Virtuozzo Application Platform is a full multi-tenant PaaS you install on a cluster of servers (or rent, pay-per-use, from a hosting provider that runs it). It brings its own container runtime (system and application containers, plus VMs for Windows), automatic vertical scaling in 128 MiB / 400 MHz “cloudlets”, a marketplace, Kubernetes packages, a billing system, reseller accounts and a cluster admin panel.
dockxo is a control panel for plain Docker on plain Linux servers. A small agent on each server dials out to the panel; the panel deploys from GitHub, images or Dockerfiles, routes domains through a per-server Traefik with Let’s Encrypt, and adds the operational pieces you would otherwise script yourself: managed MariaDB with replicas and a router, load balancers across servers, cache proxies, backups to your own bucket, uptime monitors with Telegram and email alerts, logs, terminal and files.
Same goal — push code, get a URL, sleep at night — reached from opposite ends.
What it costs
This is where the two products live in different worlds. All Virtuozzo figures below are from Virtuozzo’s own store and documentation as of September 2026.
Running Virtuozzo yourself: the licence
The Standard Edition licence is priced by the total RAM of the cluster, billed monthly:
| Cluster RAM | Licence / month | Support tickets |
|---|---|---|
| 64 GB | $192 | 12 / year |
| 128 GB | $358 | 12 / year |
| 256 GB | $665 | 24 / year |
| 512 GB | $1,229 | 24 / year |
| 1024 GB | $2,253 | unlimited |
| 2048 GB | $4,096 | unlimited |
The Business and Enterprise editions (the ones with the billing system, reseller accounts, 24/7 support and a turnkey installation) are “contact sales”, plus a one-time installation fee.
Running Virtuozzo yourself: the hardware
The licence is the small part. Virtuozzo’s hardware requirements for a production installation with local storage are:
- at least 2 infrastructure hosts (3 for a Galera database cluster), each with 12+ cores / 24 threads, 64 GB+ RAM, datacenter SSDs in RAID 1, a 10 Gbit internal network — these run the platform itself, not your apps;
- at least 3 user hosts in “capacity” mode (24+ cores, 128 GB+ RAM each) or 6 in HA mode (16+ cores, 64 GB+ RAM each) — these run your apps;
- a spare host is recommended for fast restoration after a hardware failure.
So the smallest production footprint is five dedicated servers of workstation class before the first application is deployed, plus a licence for the RAM they hold. A modest 5 × 64 GB cluster is 320 GB of RAM, which lands in the 512 GB licence tier at $1,229 a month — on top of the servers, which are easily $80–150 each per month at a European dedicated-server provider. Call it $1,700–2,000 a month for the smallest thing Virtuozzo calls production, before support beyond the ticket quota. That is where the “a thousand dollars a server” folk wisdom comes from: two infra nodes doing nothing but running the platform, and a licence bill in the four figures.
Renting Virtuozzo pay-per-use from a hosting provider
If you do not install it yourself you rent it by the cloudlet from one of Virtuozzo’s hosting partners. Prices vary by provider; a typical published rate (an Australian partner, USD) is:
| Cloudlet type | Per cloudlet-hour | Per cloudlet-month (730 h) |
|---|---|---|
| Reserved, 1–14 | $0.003658 | ≈ $2.67 |
| Dynamic, 1–14 | $0.004291 | ≈ $3.13 |
| Reserved, 240+ (best discount) | $0.002603 | ≈ $1.90 |
A cloudlet is 128 MiB of RAM and 400 MHz of CPU, and you are charged for whichever of RAM or CPU is higher each hour. A single app container with 4 GB of RAM is 32 cloudlets, so roughly $61–100 a month for one container depending on reserved/dynamic mix and discount tier, plus disk beyond the free allowance, traffic and a public IP. Every extra container — database, cache, worker — is billed the same way.
The pay-per-use model is genuinely elegant when your load swings a lot. It is also, at rest, several times the price of the raw VPS underneath.
dockxo
| dockxo (beta) | |
|---|---|
| Panel licence | $0 — every feature, no server or project cap, during the beta |
| Infrastructure nodes | none — the panel is hosted; your servers only run a small agent |
| Minimum servers | 1 (any Ubuntu 22.04+ / Debian 12+ VPS, 1 vCPU / 1 GB works) |
| Support | email from the people who build it |
A 4 GB VPS at Hetzner, Netcup, OVH or DigitalOcean costs $4–8 a month, and dockxo puts as many containers on it as it will hold. Three of them behind a dockxo load balancer come to under $25 a month for a setup that is HA at the server level. When paid plans arrive after the beta we will announce them 30 days ahead, and we will never charge for compute we do not provide.
Feature comparison
| Virtuozzo Application Platform | dockxo | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Your dedicated cluster (2+ infra hosts, 3–6+ user hosts) or a partner’s public cloud | Any VPS or dedicated box you already rent; the panel is hosted |
| Runtime | Virtuozzo system/application containers, VMs, Kubernetes packages | Plain Docker; every service is a container you can docker inspect |
| Deploy sources | Archive/URL, Git/SVN, IDE plugins, marketplace | GitHub with push-to-deploy webhook, Docker image (private registries), inline Dockerfile, one-click templates |
| Zero-downtime deploys | Yes (horizontal scaling + traffic distributor) | Yes: rolling swap with a port check before the old container is removed |
| Scaling | Automatic vertical (cloudlets) and horizontal with load triggers | Manual: deploy the same service on more servers behind a load balancer; memory limits per container |
| Domains & TLS | Built-in wildcard cert, Let’s Encrypt add-on, custom certs | Let’s Encrypt per domain on the server, free subdomains per server, redirects, per-domain HTTPS switch, Cloudflare DNS that follows moves |
| Load balancing | Traffic Distributor add-on, NGINX/HAProxy/Varnish nodes | Load balancer service across servers, health checks, sticky to the exact container, members hidden behind :8099 |
| Caching | Varnish node | nginx cache proxy service with path rules, TTL, purge, hit stats |
| Databases | Clustered MariaDB / MySQL / PostgreSQL / Mongo templates | Managed MariaDB with replicas on any server, MaxScale router with failover, health alerts; templates for Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Mongo, RabbitMQ, MinIO, Meilisearch |
| Backups | Provider/infrastructure backup integrations | Plans per project to your own S3 / R2 / B2 / Wasabi / Hetzner / MinIO bucket, sealed project file, restore on any panel |
| Monitoring | Zabbix-based infra monitoring, load alerts by email | Uptime monitors (20 s–1 h) with Telegram and email alerts, service and database health alerts, traffic stats from the proxy log |
| Shell & files | Web SSH, SSH gate, FTP/FTPS | Browser terminal into the container, file manager with edit/upload/chmod |
| Moving workloads | Live migration between hosts inside a hardware set | Migrate a service to another server with volumes streamed agent to agent; DNS records follow |
| Multi-tenant billing, resellers, marketplace | Yes — it is built to be sold as a hosting product | No — one account, your servers |
| Windows / VMs | Yes | No |
| Kubernetes | Yes (packaged cluster) | No |
| API | Full API + CLI, personal tokens | Full HTTP API, personal tokens, deploy?wait=1, restore CLI |
| Security | 2FA, network isolation, container firewall | 2FA, encrypted env and tokens, per-server agent tokens, outbound-only agent, private servers with no DNS footprint, port allow-lists |
| Support | Ticket quota by licence tier, 24/7 on Business/Enterprise | Email, best effort, during the beta |
| Price | $192–4,096 / month licence + 5+ servers, or pay-per-use cloudlets | Free during the beta |
Who should pick which
Pick Virtuozzo if you are a hosting company that wants to sell PaaS to your own customers with billing, resellers and a marketplace; if you need Windows or Kubernetes inside the same panel; if your load is so spiky that per-hour vertical scaling pays for itself; or if a 24/7 vendor SLA is a hard requirement. It is a platform for running a cloud.
Pick dockxo if you are a developer, an agency or a small team with a handful of apps and a handful of servers; if you want Docker underneath so nothing is proprietary; if you would rather add a €5 server than tune cloudlets; and if a licence bill with a comma in it is not on the table. It is a panel for running your apps.
The honest caveats
- dockxo has no automatic vertical scaling. A container gets the resources of its server and an optional memory limit. If you need more, you deploy on another server and balance.
- dockxo has no multi-tenancy or billing. It is your account and your servers.
- Virtuozzo has been in production since 2011 and runs at telcos and large hosters. dockxo is in beta; read the beta terms and keep your own backups (we make that easy).
Try it on the servers you already have
There is nothing to install on your side except one command on a server. Create an account, add a VPS, deploy something, and compare the monthly bill with a cloudlet calculator.
Sources: Virtuozzo store (Standard Edition licence tiers), Virtuozzo Ops Docs (editions comparison, hardware requirements for local storage), Virtuozzo Dev Docs (usage-based pricing), Virtuozzo Cloud Union partner pricing page. Figures retrieved 27 September 2026; check the vendor for current prices.