Virtual Private Server (VPS)

What is a VPS?

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) may sometimes be known by a number of other terms such as a VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) or Cloud Hosting Platform.

Operationally, a VPS acts in exactly the same manner as 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

Virtualisation Types Available

Whilst we have some older legacy virtualisation systems still available for existing customers, we now solely offer KVM virtualisation for the maximum compatibility and flexibility as this allows you to run your own kernel. Due to this, any operating system is supported and the hardware is fully emulated in the virtual environment.

KVM is a very mature and stable virtualisation platform and is widely used in the industry and so very well supported and developed.

KVM Virtualisation

KVM virtualization lets you boot full operating systems of different kinds, even non-Linux systems such as Windows Server. You can upload your own ISO to a KVM VPS and boot from this, therefore allowing you to install any operating system you wish.

As KVM is a kernel-based virtualisation, this also supports additional options such as our CDP backup service.

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, AlmaLinux and Fedora.

Hardware Platform

Our VPS Servers run on very high specification servers with multiple CPUs, large RAM allocations and RAID 10 storage arrays to provide the ultimate performance and reliability 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 Kernelcare which ensures that our VPS nodes are always fully up to date with the latest kernel code without ever requiring a reboot. This service is also available to order for your VPS which 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.

Features

Instant Reboots

The VPS reboot process is instant as being a virtual service this therefore does not have to go through the many steps required to boot a physical server (eg BIOS POST tests, RAID and other controller checks, driver loading, etc).

This means that should you need to reboot to make any changes take effect, downtime to your service is almost zero.

Reboots can be performed from within your VPS operating system as you would on a dedicated server, or alternatively we provide a reboot button in both our client area and the VPS control panel to perform a forced reboot if needed.

Java SSH Access

Java allows you to play online games, chat with people around the world, calculate your mortgage interest, and view images in 3D, just to name a few. It's also integral to the intranet applications and other e-business solutions that are the foundation of corporate computing.

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.

VNC Console Access

KVM Virtualisation also provides full VNC access to the server, allowing you to watch it boot/restart as well as being able to choose kernels, etc before the operating system has loaded.

This allows you to mount an ISO disk that you have uploaded to our VPS control panel and then use this to run through the full installer, as if you were working locally on the server.

We provide an HTML5 VNC client for this purpose, or you can use your own local VNC installation to connect to our VNC server.

Rescue Mode

In the event that your VPS suffers corruption or will not boot due to an accidental configuration change, we provide a Debian based secure rescue mode environment that you can use to recover your VPS.

In this mode, you can boot the VPS from our provided rescue/recovery image and then mount your filesystem to make changes and/or recover your data.

This works in a similar manner to an OS recovery CD / LiveCD image that you can boot from for fixing non-booting systems or repair filesystem corruption.

Automated OS Reloads

We provision a VPS as standard with the CentOS operating system (OS) as this is the most commonly used and widely supported whilst also being an enterprise grade OS.

You can re-install the operating system at any point you like via our VPS control panel and typically have a fresh OS installation fully up and running 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 will almost certainly suffer quite 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. All that is then required for them to take effect it a reboot of the VPS as and when convenient for you.

This means that you can start off with a smaller level of VPS and then as your requirements grow, upgrade it without any complicated configuration changes. Please note that KVM will require that you manually resize the partition on upgrade.

NB: You cannot downgrade hard disk sizes with a VPS.

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 version of cPanel installs in exactly the same manner - it just detects the VPS environment and configures itself accordingly.

The VPS licence can be purchased based on number of accounts / domains and so is ideal for small hosts or resellers looking for an option in between shared hosting and dedicated servers providing scalability.

We also offer optional server management services for our VPS servers, whether it be for ongoing monthly management of your VPS or just for some ad-hoc work as and when required. Please see our website server management page for further details.