All I know is when I SSH into my customers VPS sites, those commands are not present. Nothing that relates to the underlying system is displayable.
But when you buy a VPS, you don't get a VPS. You get an instance of a shared environment.
I.e. commands like ps, uptime, df, etc. are all disabled because they don't want you to see that "your server" is not really private.
Their support is excellent, but there is a degree of deception in what you get for what you thought your purchased based on standard industry definition of terms like VPS (I.e. virtual PRIVATE server).
Tony
I am trying for over 2 years now to get a partner on board who is willing to share our bare metal unmanaged XenServer which currently holds 4 virtual private servers sharing 64 GB and 2 500GB SSD's. I posted this here and elsewhere but no response.
Now i must say I am not certified hosting provider nor a linux systems administrator but I know my way around it and getting an expert onboard who is willing to invest time and can chip in a few bucks each month would do it for us.
Okay, so I had the same issue about a year ago, where the caching of our website was completely ff'ed up. It gave an error that stated there were no writing permissions for the cache folder, this was on a windows server which makes it even weirder as windows server doesn't have file permissions. So after battling this issue for about a month we decided that it was about time to move to a different server.
This was a company called True.nl, and I must say that I am very satisfied with them. They will respond in under 10 minutes when your server is down and have 24/7 support. They also manage your server so vulnerability patches and such are also done automatically. Furthermore, they have a very good SLA. The only thing is that such service comes at a high price. If you were to take the 'Silver SLA' with a server which has 4GB ram and 2 cores you would pay almost €350 a month. I know it's pricey but at least you are guaranteed not to have downtime, which is essential when you have a proper ecommerce business!
My experience with Siteground is completely on the opposite side. I'm using their shared hosting and VPS plans and I'm really happy with all the services. I don't know why you had such a bad experience with them, maybe before some years they were still learning, but now I'm can say that they are offering really professional services. But of course, it is also important what kind of projects are you hosting, our websites are not so big and they don't need a lot of resources. Nowadays, every web hosting company is offering a money-back option, so you are more or less safe to try and test and if you are not happy to ask for a refund.
My issue with Siteground is that they're a bit deceptive.
Go to a shell prompt and type 'ps', 'free', 'vmstat', 'df' or any other system resource command. None of them will be found because you don't really get a true VPS, you're getting some instance of a shared server and they are hiding it from you.
Their support is responsive and seems to be of good quality (limited experience). But a VPS should be a wholly owned instance of a server (virtual) and I don't believe they are providing that.
I guess that will be difficult to prove, but as I said our projects aren't so big and we had no problems.