Frequently Asked Questions
1. What do I need to do if I want to direct my domain / website to my virtual server?
You have to request the DNS settings ("A" record) modification at your DNS provider, to point to your VPS' IP address. Due to the caching of the nameservers, this can take 12-24 hours to go around the world.
2. What are the benefits of a virtual server?
The advantages of this technology are - but not only - low operational costs, easier manageability, lower environmental strain, no need to buy high-priced brand servers, and the service can be accounted as OPEX (operational expense), not CAPEX. Also, it does not require local, physical maintaining from the customer's side, and its expansion can be solved easily, with a few clicks.
3. Can I use custom kernels or kernel modules?
Due to the paravirtualization itself, completely custom kernels can not be used. However, you can request a list of kernels available for your virtual servers' architecture which we have tested from A-Z, and this could be set up for you with your cooperation. This list currently consists of 32-bit i386 kernels, beginning from 2.6.25 and going upwards from officially released mainline sources.
4. What is the maximum amount of memory and hard disk that can be assigned to a VPS?
We have specified this value in 2Gb of memory and 80Gb of disk space. If you need more resources than this, we recommend you to buy or rent an own dedicated server, in which we can help you, of course.
5. Which are the areas that a VPS can be recommended for?
First of all, it's consolidation. In practice, this means migrating the under-utilized servers into one big physical server, resulting in significant cost decrease, also lower environmental strain.
Virtual servers can also be considered for webservers with low- or medium traffic, smaller database servers, VoIP concentrators, backup servers, name servers, and we could say a hundred other area. Also, it can be used for serving seasonal projects.
It could be of good use for start-up companies, which usually do not need loads of CPUs for the beginning, but would be happy to expand the server easily as time goes by.
6. How secure is a virtual server?
The hypervisor is completely separating the guest operating systems and their memory area, and the VPSes are stored on separate physical partitions. There is no way to cross the boundaries.
7. I would like to move my server into a virtualized environment, is this a hard job to do?
It's practical to choose the same OS, its distribution and its version, so most of the time can be spent copying the data and the application configuration, not with upgrading them to probably new major versions. Practically, this could also be tied together with minor bugfix upgrades on your new virtual server.
8. Which OSes are supported?
Currently Linux, Windows XP and Windows 2003. FreeBSD is soon to come.
9. What performance degradation can I expect in a virtualized environment?
The Xen hypervisor which we are using for this service supports more virtualization method, namely paravirtualization and HVM (hardware-assisted virtualization).
The prior one requires an OS that has a Xen-compatible kernel and kernel modules, currently this is Linux. Compared to a physical server, this results in about 5-10% degradation, but benchmarks show that some cases this is even less.
The latter one supports running other, non Xen-compatible OSes, like Windows, OpenBSD. In this case the CPU performance remains with the same 5-10% degradation, but basically the I/O operations - like disk read/write or network traffic - severely slow down, about 30-40%. This solution is recommended for those customers, who plan to use services with high CPU-load but with low network traffic. Regarding Windows, drivers exists to improve I/O performance, but these are under development yet. (However, we haven't experienced BSODs with them in the last 6 months.)
1. What do I need to do if I want to direct my domain / website to my virtual server?
You have to request the DNS settings ("A" record) modification at your DNS provider, to point to your VPS' IP address. Due to the caching of the nameservers, this can take 12-24 hours to go around the world.
2. What are the benefits of a virtual server?
The advantages of this technology are - but not only - low operational costs, easier manageability, lower environmental strain, no need to buy high-priced brand servers, and the service can be accounted as OPEX (operational expense), not CAPEX. Also, it does not require local, physical maintaining from the customer's side, and its expansion can be solved easily, with a few clicks.
3. Can I use custom kernels or kernel modules?
Due to the paravirtualization itself, completely custom kernels can not be used. However, you can request a list of kernels available for your virtual servers' architecture which we have tested from A-Z, and this could be set up for you with your cooperation. This list currently consists of 32-bit i386 kernels, beginning from 2.6.25 and going upwards from officially released mainline sources.
4. What is the maximum amount of memory and hard disk that can be assigned to a VPS?
We have specified this value in 2Gb of memory and 80Gb of disk space. If you need more resources than this, we recommend you to buy or rent an own dedicated server, in which we can help you, of course.
5. Which are the areas that a VPS can be recommended for?
First of all, it's consolidation. In practice, this means migrating the under-utilized servers into one big physical server, resulting in significant cost decrease, also lower environmental strain.
Virtual servers can also be considered for webservers with low- or medium traffic, smaller database servers, VoIP concentrators, backup servers, name servers, and we could say a hundred other area. Also, it can be used for serving seasonal projects.
It could be of good use for start-up companies, which usually do not need loads of CPUs for the beginning, but would be happy to expand the server easily as time goes by.
6. How secure is a virtual server?
The hypervisor is completely separating the guest operating systems and their memory area, and the VPSes are stored on separate physical partitions. There is no way to cross the boundaries.
7. I would like to move my server into a virtualized environment, is this a hard job to do?
It's practical to choose the same OS, its distribution and its version, so most of the time can be spent copying the data and the application configuration, not with upgrading them to probably new major versions. Practically, this could also be tied together with minor bugfix upgrades on your new virtual server.
8. Which OSes are supported?
Currently Linux, Windows XP and Windows 2003. FreeBSD is soon to come.
9. What performance degradation can I expect in a virtualized environment?
The Xen hypervisor which we are using for this service supports more virtualization method, namely paravirtualization and HVM (hardware-assisted virtualization).
The prior one requires an OS that has a Xen-compatible kernel and kernel modules, currently this is Linux. Compared to a physical server, this results in about 5-10% degradation, but benchmarks show that some cases this is even less.
The latter one supports running other, non Xen-compatible OSes, like Windows, OpenBSD. In this case the CPU performance remains with the same 5-10% degradation, but basically the I/O operations - like disk read/write or network traffic - severely slow down, about 30-40%. This solution is recommended for those customers, who plan to use services with high CPU-load but with low network traffic. Regarding Windows, drivers exists to improve I/O performance, but these are under development yet. (However, we haven't experienced BSODs with them in the last 6 months.)