You make a good point Blueroomhosting.

Unfortunately, I believe that the only way to prove whether you're receiving real RAM or swap is to have the VPS up and running to monitor the resource usage. So basically, you still need to consider guaranteed RAM as the only 'sort of real' resource.

If I remember correctly, even without the virtualization sofware combining swap and RAM, a host can 'oversell' memory and storage during the creation of VPS's, so until you start using the VPS, you'll never really know for sure what your guaranteed resources are.

As the technology matures, it's becoming very much like shared accounts with regard to both price and resources. While VPS's are much more isolated, host machines can be over sold or be slowed by a runaway script running on a separate VPS which causes the entire host to slow or crash.