It highly depends on how the Lisp implementation works and how the VPS is implemented. The short description of the problem is that some Lisps (SBCL) make a lot of assumptions about the address space they are going to be loaded into, such as what address ranges are used. They optimize their load time through these assumptions, adjusting as little as possible of their core file, for instance. In a non-virtualized environment, these assumptions typically hold, but they can be violated in virtualized environment.
There are typically two types of VPS implementation:
- a "containers" system like Parallels Virtuozzo
- a true hypervisor system like VMware or Xen
Containers-based systems are much more efficient at packing VMs onto hardware (they are more memory efficient). Unfortunately, they violate the address space assumptions used by Lisps like SBCL. True hypervisor systems (VMware, Xen, VirtualBox, Parallels on Mac OSX) do not have this problem. But they also can't pack as many virtual machines onto hardware, so many hosting companies prefer containers-based systems like Virtuozzo because they make the hardware go farther.
Note that only some CLs are affected, notably SBCL and CMUCL. CLISP and ECL should still work fine, I believe. Unfortunately, most other programs and scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.) are not affected by this, so there is little incentive for the hosting companies to see this as a problem with their virtualization environment; rather, they'll view it as a problem with Lisp.