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Hostnix : Services : Virtual Dedicated Servers : Linux
Linux Virtual Dedicated Server
We are currently offering collocated Linux servers, with unlimited technical support, at a steep discount to collocation products offered by
companies such as Yahoo and Verio.
A collocated RedHat Linux 7.2 server, with up to 10 IPs, and 4 gigabytes of disk space will cost you $95 $75 per month, with no setup
fees or hardware costs.
Your server will be allowed 40 gigabytes of network transfer per month, with each additional gigabyte incurring a $2.00 fee.
(you may request traffic limits to avoid exceeding your transfer limit, and incurring additional charges)
Additional disk space can be seamlessly added at any time for $2.00/Gig per month.
The Network
Your server will be housed in a secure datacenter. This datacenter is triple-homed (has three distinct physical connections to
each of Sprint, XO, and Genuity) and has industrial grade uninterruptible power supplies backed by Diesel power plants, which
can be used in the event of a prolonged power outage. A non-liquid fire suppression system is in place, and human personnel
are on-site 24 hours per day monitoring network conditions.
Your server sits behind a firewall and intrusion detection system. You may submit to us as many ipfw rules pertaining to your
IP as you like, and they will be added to the firewall. In essence, it is like administering your own firewall in addition to
your server.
Unlimited Technical Support
We provide extremely technical support. It is not uncommon for our support technicians to help customers chroot a name server,
compile a thir d party mail server, or troubleshoot compilation problems. Your technical support will NOT consist of vague
suggestions coming from barely te chnical phone reps reading from a hint card - it will come from expert UNIX administrators
that have been running their own servers for years.
Technicians are on-call 24 hours per day. Not only can they help you with ongoing issues, such as rebooting or examining the
state of your se rver, but they can also help you with initial configuration issues, such as choosing which packages to
install and in what manner.
In addition to these technicians, data center staff monitor the physical aspect of the network 24 hours per day, ensuring
climate and power re main within tolerances.
Hardware
Our steep discounts are made possible by technology that allows us to segment Enterprise class servers into multiple,
independent servers - each one a completely autonomous system.
Each server has multiple processors, and many gigabytes of RAM. The servers have multiple hot-swap power supplies, large hot
swap fans, and all disk devices are RAID storage. This is much more reliable than a 1U server with tiny fans, non
fault-tolerant disk I/O, and a single power supply.
How is having your own VDS different than simple web-hosting ?
You have an entire server to yourself. You have super-user (root) access, and have complete control over all packages,
processes, and services that you wish to add. You have an IP address of your own, and may use it in any way you see fit. You
may add additional users and give accounts on your system to other people. You can host any number of different web sites on
your server for you or your own customers.
Performance
Each machine has multiple processors and many gigabytes of RAM - at any given moment you will have access to a large majority
of these resources. This is because usage is highly non-parallel, and because server instances can be transparently moved from
one physical server to the next.
All storage is hardware RAID for performance and fault tolerance. Your system will automatically be backed up on a nightly
basis.
We have in place sophisticated methods of performance "smoothing" between our host machines that allows us to transparently
place each server instance in an optimal performance environment. Translation: your server will never be slow due to the
operations of other server nodes in the cluster.
Unique Benefits
Servers collocated in this fashion have unique benefits over traditional collocation.
You are not responsible for the underlying hardware, and thus do not need to respond to equipment failures. If you crash or
incapacitate your server, you do not need to wait for POST operations and other boot time delays. Further, your filesystem is
not in jeopardy due to crashes or halts - there is no need to `fsck` or otherwise maintain the filesystem after a crash.
The hardware your server exists on is much more fault-tolerant than a machine you would collocate on from a traditional
provider. It is common for our servers to have three or more independent power supplies each attached to a different physical
circuit, four or more independent and hot-swappable fan units, and RAID storage running on duplexed adaptors. Each of our
systems can withstand a large number of component failures without interrupting service. Other collocation vendors cannot
offer this.
There is a performance benefit as well - no matter how fast the single processor non-RAID systems offered by other vendors
are, they do not offer anywhere near the performance of quad-processer servers running with fast RAID arrays. Sizing and
performance tuning manuals conclude that performance issues are almost always due to disk I/O. The disk I/O on our systems
blows away that of rackmount co-lo servers offered by other vendors.
In the event of some catastrophic data loss, we can simply restore the previous nights image of your server, and restart it -
a process that can take as little as ten minutes to complete. This means you do not even need to do your own backups (you may
wish to backup your data more often, or to a seperate site - if so, let us know and we can help).
Your Environment
Your server contains a fully populated RedHat filesystem, and is configured with a full suite of tools and applications (apache, mysql, sendmail, postgres,
etc). We can support you and provide documentation and HOWTOs for installing and configuring any services you would like to run, such as web servers, databases,
dns servers, etc.
The choice of which packages to install and how to run them, however, is up to you. You should have a working knowledge of compiling software, adding packages,
changing passwords, adding users, and starting/stopping services.
Please email info@hostnix.com if you
have any further questions!
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