VPS FreeBSD Hosting

[Jim Flowers]

I gave up maintaining my own hardware for providing cloud computing
services about 10 years ago and have been using several dedicated server
services with root-access FreeBSD since about 6.0. with good results. At
the time VPS looked like too many problems.

Now, however, it looks like there are quite a number of mature VPS hosting
services that are FreeBSD-centric at very attractive prices. Most offer KVM
or VPS-instance access to allow rebooting and reinstallation.

Can anyone comment on the providers and the technology in the context of
having used them specifically for FreeBSD in the last few years? Good?
Bad? Indifferent?

Fairly modest duty - spam filtering, mailboxes, websites, storage, reverse
proxy and the like.

Oh yeah, some development.

Thanks
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[Daniel Feenberg]

On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Jim Flowers wrote:

> I gave up maintaining my own hardware for providing cloud computing
> services about 10 years ago and have been using several dedicated server
> services with root-access FreeBSD since about 6.0. with good results. At
> the time VPS looked like too many problems.
>
> Now, however, it looks like there are quite a number of mature VPS hosting
> services that are FreeBSD-centric at very attractive prices. Most offer KVM
> or VPS-instance access to allow rebooting and reinstallation.
>
> Can anyone comment on the providers and the technology in the context of
> having used them specifically for FreeBSD in the last few years? Good?
> Bad? Indifferent?
>

We have had good experience with pair.com and rootbsd.com. Both were used
for websites. We never had any problems with either, so I can't report on
their problem solving skills, but customer service from both was good for
the handful of routine questions we had.

dan feenberg

[Bruce Cran]

On 25/11/2012 21:08, Jim Flowers wrote:
> Can anyone comment on the providers and the technology in the context of
> having used them specifically for FreeBSD in the last few years? Good?
> Bad? Indifferent?

What part of the world are you in? In the US there's RootBSD; in Europe
there are a few, including Goscomb.

--
Bruce Cran

[Michael Sierchio]

Top-posting for brevity. I use EC2. You can start with Colin
Percival's HVM instances - I run a Xen kernel using a modified version
of his original scheme - which is to have a 1GB Linux partition
running grub to boot from a FreeBSD disk. I'm happy to share an AMI
with you, but you should try Colin's stuff.

On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Jim Flowers <jflo...@ezo.net> wrote:
> I gave up maintaining my own hardware for providing cloud computing
> services about 10 years ago and have been using several dedicated server
> services with root-access FreeBSD since about 6.0. with good results. At
> the time VPS looked like too many problems.

[Arthur Chance]

On 11/25/12 22:07, Michael Sierchio wrote:
> Top-posting for brevity. I use EC2. You can start with Colin
> Percival's HVM instances - I run a Xen kernel using a modified version
> of his original scheme - which is to have a 1GB Linux partition
> running grub to boot from a FreeBSD disk. I'm happy to share an AMI
> with you, but you should try Colin's stuff.
>
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Jim Flowers <jflo...@ezo.net> wrote:
>> I gave up maintaining my own hardware for providing cloud computing
>> services about 10 years ago and have been using several dedicated server
>> services with root-access FreeBSD since about 6.0. with good results. At
>> the time VPS looked like too many problems.

FreeBSD is now officially supported by Amazon (but still supplied by
Colin) as well as Colin's "defenestrated" FreeBSD AMIs.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/aws-marketplace-additional-operating-system-support.html

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK/ref=sp_mpg_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-2

However, these are only on the new 3rd generation of EC2 instances,
which are heavy duty systems. For many uses micro instances are enough,
but you still have to pay the "Windows tax" on those. I don't know
whether Colin is working to change that, or if there are technical
reasons why it's impossible.

http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

[Hub- FreeBSD]

For those looking for non-US based servers, we (http://hub.org) have been proudly offering FreeBSD since '95 …

[Michael Sierchio]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 2:18 AM, Arthur Chance <fre...@qeng-ho.org> wrote:

> However, these are only on the new 3rd generation of EC2 instances, which
> are heavy duty systems. For many uses micro instances are enough, but you
> still have to pay the "Windows tax" on those. I don't know whether Colin is
> working to change that, or if there are technical reasons why it's
> impossible.

I am running a t1.micro instance w/FreeBSD 8.3 i386, based on Colin's
original scheme of booting from a 1GB Linux partition which grub boots
a BSD root disk. It works fine, and no Windoze tax. I am happy to
share an AMI which works - my current approach is to use a single 16GB
drive with fairly normal partitions and GEOM ELI encrypted swap.

- M

[Robison, Dave]

On 11/25/2012 13:08, Jim Flowers wrote:

> Can anyone comment on the providers and the technology in the context of
> having used them specifically for FreeBSD in the last few years? Good?
> Bad? Indifferent?
>

I've been using ARP networks for a couple of years now and I'm quite happy.

http://www.arpnetworks.com/



--
Dave Robison
Sales Solution Architect II
FIS Banking Solutions
510/621-2089 (w)
530/518-5194 (c)
510/621-2020 (f)
da...@vicor.com
david....@fisglobal.com

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[George Hartzell]

Robison, Dave writes:
> On 11/25/2012 13:08, Jim Flowers wrote:
>
> > Can anyone comment on the providers and the technology in the context of
> > having used them specifically for FreeBSD in the last few years? Good?
> > Bad? Indifferent?
> >
>
> I've been using ARP networks for a couple of years now and I'm quite happy.
>
> http://www.arpnetworks.com/
>

I'll second that. I have a smaller and a larger VPS at ARP, they've
been great.

g.

[Jeremy Johnston]

Hello,

We at SmartServ Hosting, http://www.smart-serv.net/, have been
offering VPS containers supporting FreeBSD for over a year and
previously ran all our services from FreeBSD on bare metal before moving
into our virtualization environment where we continue to use FreeBSD for
our core services. We have hosts available in US and France currently.

[Shane Ambler]

On 26/11/2012 20:48, Arthur Chance wrote:
>
> FreeBSD is now officially supported by Amazon (but still supplied by
> Colin) as well as Colin's "defenestrated" FreeBSD AMIs.
>

I don't use them yet but while looking into cloud setups I found that
rackspace have offered freebsd 9 images for us to build a server with
since July. They don't offer it as a supported system on their managed
solutions but they are happy for you to build your own server with it,
even looks like you can use zfs.

[Randal L. Schwartz]

>>>>> "George" == George Hartzell <hart...@alerce.com> writes:

George> I'll second that. I have a smaller and a larger VPS at ARP, they've
George> been great.

And I've been running 5 FreeBSD servers of various sizes there for
something like two years (or has it been three?). All booting from ZFS
as /. Fun.

--
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<mer...@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See http://methodsandmessages.posterous.com/ for Smalltalk discussion

[David Brodbeck]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 1:18 PM, Daniel Feenberg <feen...@nber.org> wrote:

> We have had good experience with pair.com and rootbsd.com. Both were used
> for websites. We never had any problems with either, so I can't report on
> their problem solving skills, but customer service from both was good for
> the handful of routine questions we had.
>

I'm using rootbsd.com as well. I run a few low-traffic websites and a
couple MUDs off one of their Lambda instances. I've found their customer
service to be prompt and helpful on the few occasions when I've had
problems.