Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

What is a VPS?

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) operationally is in effect your own dedicated server. Unlike a physical dedicated server where the server hardware is exclusively for your own use, our VPS platform pools and divides resources across multiple virtual servers running on the same hardware. This provides very efficient use of dedicated servers which may normally only be lightly loaded whilst also helping to reduce your carbon footprint.

Your VPS runs its own operating system of your choice from our available list and can be rebooted completely independently of the main server and any other hosted VPS. You also have full root level access to the VPS so as to configure as you wish.

Due to the fact that you do not have the sole use of a dedicated server, VPS costs are therefore considerably lower and are ideal for bridging the gap between large shared hosting or reseller accounts and dedicated servers, custom configurations, development work or even independent DNS/mail servers, etc

Operating Systems Available

We provide a wide range of Linux based operating systems for you to choose from. As default, CentOS 64bit is installed on your VPS, however you can change this to any one of the provided operating systems which includes Debian, Suse Linux, Ubuntu and Fedora.

Features

Instant reboots

A VPS reboot is instant as this does not have to go through the many steps required to boot a physical server (eg BIOS POST, driver loading, etc). This means that should you need to reboot to make any changes take effect, downtime to your service is almost zero.

 Java SSH access

In the event that you accidentally lock yourself out of your server, for example by incorrectly configuring firewall settings then we provide a Java based SSH console that you can use to connect to your VPS and still log in. This works in a similar effect to KVM over IP on a traditional hardware server. This will also allow you to access your server from a location where you may not have access to an SSH client.

Automated OS reloads

We provision a VPS as standard with the CentOS operating system as this is the most widely supported and is an enterprise grade OS. You can re-install the OS at any point you like via our VPS control panel and typically have a fresh OS installation in under a minute. You can also use this feature to switch to a different operating system on your VPS, such as Debian, etc

Scalable

Unlike with a physical dedicated server where you may suffer some downtime to add more physical memory or hard disk space or move to a faster server, package upgrades are performed instantly on our VPS platform without having to reconfigure or change your settings.

Hardware

Our VPS Servers run on very high specification servers with a minimum of 2 x Quad Core Processors, 24Gb DDR3 RAM and SAS RAID 10 storage arrays to provide the ultimate performance levels. We do not oversell resources so as to ensure that your VPS performs at its peak levels without any degradation of service.

Our VPS platform is also backed by the commercial application Ksplice which ensures that our VPS servers are always fully up to date with the latest kernel code without requiring a reboot. This in turn means that you do not suffer any downtime yourself as would be required normally to reboot a server to load an updated kernel.

Additional options available

The VPS Optimised version of cPanel is specifically designed to use less resources as opposed to the dedicated server version. This is ideal for use on a VPS and provides you with full management of your hosting accounts. The VPS licence also allows you to host an unlimited number of accounts / domains and so is ideal for small hosts or resellers looking for an option in between shared hosting and dedicated servers.

We also offer server management of our VPS servers. Please see our management page for further details.

All prices exclude VAT