Hey there,

I can't seem to find any threads about this here so maybe this is a complete no-brainer, but I've had VPS's at several other hosting companies with root access and I've never seen the output from top so jam packed with stuff I don't recognize.

What are the processes such as kthreadd, kworker, migration, etc? Are typically hidden by default?

With 'man top' you can find all the options to manage top.

In any case I do prefer to run htop. Give it a try.

It is likely your old hosts didn't use Xen (probably something like OpenVZ), and so you didn't see these processes. The processes you mention are processes that do things for the kernel, and you'd see them (or similar) if you looked on a physical computer.

htop will show you the same thing as top, but the UI is a bit different, and doesn't actually change anything.