FreeBSD Hosting/Shared/VPS etc.

I host my blog/email/xmpp/quake3 on a 1024MiB Prgmr Xen VPS running FreeBSD 9.0. The installation is sort of a huge pain, but their prices are great and #prgmr on Freenode is just a /join away. There's an installation guide available over here.
 
I am pretty happy now with my VPS at tilaa.nl, but I ran into a really bizarre problem with the clock freezing, which I detailed here. Upgrading to two CPUs seem to have fixed it (as Tilaa support suggested), at the cost of a few more euri per month (No longer a Low End Box). Still wondering though whether anyone else has seen this problem with single-core FreeBSD VPSs.
 
UK Virtual hosting advice requested

This isn't a FreeBSD particular question but there may be some expertise here and I would
appreciate any advice.

I need to move my company's infrastructure, in London, out of the building in a few months.
We have quite a few servers, 20-30, linux, FreeBSD and Bill Gates, I was thinking of
virtual/cloud type stuff rather than dedicated hosted servers.
We need to minimise man hours but obviously we can consolidate some of our services.

I am currently looking at UKFast and Elastichosts.
Does anyone have any experience/advice in this field?
Any recommendations for suppliers?
 
I plumped for elastichosts.
You can install any PC operating system at all, they have a selection of pre-installed linux and DOS out of the box drives but they have a FreeBSD install DVD you can step through. You can even upload your own ISO boot image.
They are a very good price too, no upfront contract.
You can configure everything through a web interface, disks, RAM, CPU.
 
If you're located in Europe, I can only vouch for Hetzner, and especially their server bidding if you're looking for a dedicated server. They also have some nice features, e.g. vKVM (enabling you to remote control your server from early boot, allowing single user mode etc.) and a mfsBSD based rescue system via PXE.
I pay €35 (~$45) a month for an Athlon64 X2 6000+ (2x3GHz) with 8GB RAM, 100/100 mbit with 5TB traffic and two 750GB SATA 7200rpm drives, on which I run FreeBSD 9.1 with ZFS.

For VPS hosting, I have had good experiences with Tilaa, although it becomes quite expensive if you need more than ~100GB of space.
 
cbrace said:
I am pretty happy now with my VPS at tilaa.nl, but I ran into a really bizarre problem with the clock freezing, which I detailed here. Upgrading to two CPUs seem to have fixed it (as Tilaa support suggested), at the cost of a few more euri per month (No longer a Low End Box). Still wondering though whether anyone else has seen this problem with single-core FreeBSD VPSs.

I only had a single core VPS for a few days before upgrading to dual-core, but I didn't notice any problems in the meantime. With both machines however, I experienced extreme clock drift even with ntpd running, which was easily fixed by adding kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254 to /etc/sysctl.conf.
This is apparently a common problem with FreeBSD running under KVM, but I didn't know of it until contacting Tilaa's customer support.

I also had them enable VirtIO on my VPS for use with the emulators/virtio-kmod drivers, but it resulted in kernel call traces on their KVM host, so I had to switch back to IDE emulation. I don't know if it was caused by a bug in the FreeBSD driver or the Linux host kernel, but in either case it is possible that it has been fixed in the meantime (I haven't had the time to bug search). It should give a pretty nice performance boost however, so it's probably worth looking into for Tilaa customers.
 
I've been using OVH for a year or so, though I've been using a dedicated server as they don't offer FreeBSD on their VPS's. However they have very cheap dedicated servers as well that are cheaper than most VPS's out there.
I really like OVH, they have really good service and you get a lot for the money. I had 2 drives in a raid and one of them crashed, they changed it within the hour. You also get a /64 block IPv6 and 1 public IP where you can buy more.

If you want a dedicated server I could really recommend OVH. If you don't have OVH in your country you have to register on ovh.com and it's french, but translate in Chrome should do the trick.
 
I have been complaining about Hetzner regarding their retarded support system as well as their bandwidth and security issues.

I remember once that when I asked for remote console they gave me another customer's server. I could reboot it, mount my own ISO and change the root password. Now comes this:

Dear Client

At the end of last week, Hetzner technicians discovered a "backdoor" in one
of our internal monitoring systems (Nagios).

An investigation was launched immediately and showed that the administration
interface for dedicated root servers (Robot) had also been affected. Current
findings would suggest that fragments of our client database had been copied
externally.

As a result, we currently have to consider the client data stored in our Robot
as compromised.

To our knowledge, the malicious program that we have discovered is as yet
unknown and has never appeared before.

The malicious code used in the "backdoor" exclusively infects the RAM. First
analysis suggests that the malicious code directly infiltrates running Apache
and sshd processes. Here, the infection neither modifies the binaries of the
service which has been compromised, nor does it restart the service which has
been affected.

The standard techniques used for analysis such as the examination of checksum
or tools such as "rkhunter" are therefore not able to track down the malicious
code.

We have commissioned an external security company with a detailed analysis of
the incident to support our in-house administrators. At this stage, analysis
of the incident has not yet been completed.

The access passwords for your Robot client account are stored in our database
as Hash (SHA256) with salt. As a precaution, we recommend that you change your
client passwords in the Robot.

With credit cards, only the last three digits of the card number, the card type
and the expiry date are saved in our systems. All other card data is saved
solely by our payment service provider and referenced via a pseudo card number.
Therefore, as far as we are aware, credit card data has not been compromised.

Hetzner technicians are permanently working on localising and preventing possible
security vulnerabilities as well as ensuring that our systems and infrastructure
are kept as safe as possible. Data security is a very high priority for us. To
expedite clarification further, we have reported this incident to the data
security authority concerned.

Furthermore, we are in contact with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in
regard to this incident.

Naturally, we shall inform you of new developments immediately.

We very much regret this incident and thank you for your understanding and
trust in us.

A special FAQs page has been set up at
http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Security_Issue/en to assist you with further
enquiries.

Kind regards

Martin Hetzner

Hetzner Online AG
Stuttgarter Str. 1
91710 Gunzenhausen / Germany
Tel: +49 (9831) 61006-1
Fax: +49 (9831) 61006-2
security-mailing@hetzner.de
http://www.hetzner.com
 
Sounds like a professional response to discovering compromised systems. They stored their password databases as salted hashs, didn't keep too much credit card data around and informed their customers by mail.
 
Crest said:
Sounds like a professional response to discovering compromised systems. They stored their password databases as salted hashs, didn't keep too much credit card data around and informed their customers by mail.

Right!

How about bank data (debit note)? Is this compromised?

Bank details are encrypted (two-way) in the database. However, it cannot be excluded that the attacker/s have also been able to obtain access to the key.

Source: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Security_Issue/en
 
DotBlock

I use DotBlock for my FreeBSD 9.1 64bit VPS service. For 39.95 I get 3GHZ processing, 3GB of RAM!!!, 40GB SSD Raid Storage and unmetered bandwidth. WOW! They offer excellent service and I highly recommend them.


http://www.dotblock.com/
 
Just noticed this thread and although my personal favourite has already been mentioned upstream I can't help expanding a little bit on it with some more advocacy.

Another vote for TransIP, especially nice if you're from the Netherlands. However, I'd like to expand a little bit as to why I think this is such a good choice if you look at the price/quality:

  • Every VPS has console access, it doesn't matter if you pick up the cheapest or most expensive.
  • Because of the previous point you can choose how to set up your VPS: either use a pre-defined installation setup or simply install the OS yourself. The latter avoids such nastiness such as getting an environment with only one partition (/ which could be a major security issue). You can even set up ZFS this way if you want to.
  • Optimal specifications. Mid range (at the time of writing) has approximately 4 GB of memory, 150 GB storage, 5 TB traffic per month and will cost you approximately $26,- / month, or E20,- / month.
  • One snapshot backup. Even if you use ZFS yourself this could be handy to have.
  • Monitoring: if something goes wrong they can even sent you SMS alerts.
  • Cancellation per month: and the best part is that you don't have to go through a lot of paperwork either, while they still make sure that your environment is protected against abuse.
  • For commercial use: their API allows you to provide specific services on your own website; it's extremely easy and can be used on most platforms (from PHP right to ASP.NET).
And one specific point I'd like to mention even though I only experienced it once myself.. Earlier this year they changed the specification for their VPS services. Under normal circumstances any existing customers would basically be out of luck. Not so much with TransIP: they provided the option to upgrade your server(s) to the new specifications without additional costs.

And finally the most compelling reason of them all, the one which will most likely massively persuade you guys: You may actually encounter me on their user forums :e Here's only hoping it doesn't persuade you all to quickly run away now
devilgrin.gif
.

Cool thread!
 
ShelLuser said:
  • (...)
  • Optimal specifications. Mid range (at the time of writing) has approximately 4 GB of memory, 150 GB storage, 5 GB traffic per month and will cost you approximately $26,- / month, or E20,- / month.
  • (...)

You should add a threesome of zero's to that.
 
OH said:
You should add a threesome of zero's to that.
I can do better than that; I simply replaced the G with a T. This way hopefully no one will notice. Oh wait... ;)

Very dumb mistake on my part, that's what you get for trying to be "smart" and then overlooking the obvious. Thanks for the heads up! :)
 
Elastichosts now do FreeBSD install disks.

I have been using them since before Christmas, 24 x 7 financial data. I run about 20 servers. I am using Debian though as FreeBSD wasn't an option at the time and we needed a pronto turnaround, we were being evicted!

I doubt if anyone has an easier to use system. complete control over machines, storage, VLANs, IP adresses etc. from a brilliant web interface. No unscheduled downtime at all yet, and very good price.
 
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