FreeBSD Hosting/Shared/VPS etc.

may said:
I will second RamHost (http://www.ramhost.us/) and give a shoutout to their TinyKVM brand (http://tinykvm.com/), for those of you who are OK with something tiny. I have had solid service from them.

I can third RamHost. Excellent service at a great price. I am currently looking at TransIP https://www.transip.nl/vps/. Their site appears to be in Dutch but thanks to Chrome's translate function I can view their offers which appear to be extremely good on pricing. I am considering a BladeVPS X4.
 
manas said:

Sorry about that. I have had three posts disappear and do not know what is going on. I had this to say:
  • Tilaa: Smooth order and deployment process. They do not provide access to boot into the installation cd.
  • RamHost/TinyKVM: Very good price, great service and response times. Provides access to boot into the installation CD.
  • TransIP: I just got one of their BladeVPS X4. Very quick deployment after order. Provides access to boot into a livecd.
 
manas said:
I have had three posts disappear and do not know what is going on.
Those posts were stuck in the moderation queue. We try to approve legitimate posts as quickly as we can, but it's still manual labour and sometimes it may take a little while before someone gets around to it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
 
may said:
I will second RamHost (http://www.ramhost.us/) and give a shoutout to their TinyKVM brand (http://tinykvm.com/), for those of you who are OK with something tiny. I have had solid service from them.

I just ordered tinyKVM finally got the KVM ready and installing FreeBSD. I have a few questions that are taking a while to answer via support if you don't mind:

1. I got that you have to install EVERYTHING, nothing is done for you. Right?
2. A few other KVM/BSD hosts mount /usr/ports from elsewhere, so it WON'T use up all you disk usage quota, which is nice, since I cannot seem to install /usr/ports without running out of inodes. Do they do this? This seems like a no-brainer type of idea.
And most importantly:
3. What do you do about version? Do you follow -stable or -current and compile once a new release is out? Do you do freebsd-update? I currently have 9.0-RELEASE installed, which is the CD they had for mounting. Unfortunately it seems 9.1 (and maybe 9.2) has an issue with KVM (in fact ramhost specifically downgraded their available iso to 9.0 after finding out that 9.1 has issues). What is a good strategy in general you guys have found? I mean, I don't have a LOT of bandwidth to waste on binary updates..but I have even less RAM available to waste (currently have only 40MB free).
 
TinyKVM...

TjPhysicist said:
I just ordered tinyKVM finally got the KVM ready and installing FreeBSD. I have a few questions that are taking a while to answer via support if you don't mind:

1. I got that you have to install EVERYTHING, nothing is done for you. Right?
2. A few other KVM/BSD hosts mount /usr/ports from elsewhere, so it WON'T use up all you disk usage quota, which is nice, since I cannot seem to install /usr/ports without running out of inodes. Do they do this? This seems like a no-brainer type of idea.
And most importantly:
3. What do you do about version? Do you follow -stable or -current and compile once a new release is out? Do you do freebsd-update? I currently have 9.0-RELEASE installed, which is the CD they had for mounting. Unfortunately it seems 9.1 (and maybe 9.2) has an issue with KVM (in fact ramhost specifically downgraded their available iso to 9.0 after finding out that 9.1 has issues). What is a good strategy in general you guys have found? I mean, I don't have a LOT of bandwidth to waste on binary updates..but I have even less RAM available to waste (currently have only 40MB free).

1. Yes, you are responsible for setting up the VPS as you see fit. You are given web-based console with which to carry out the installation from the installation disk. There is an unformatted hard drive available so essentially what you get is what you would see if you booted up into a FreeBSD disk with a computer that has a blank hard drive.
2. I do not know if RamHost provides remote copies of the ports tree. I ran into the problem of insufficient inodes for ports tree too. There are three things that you can do:
  • Don't use ports, install using packages. For example pkg_add -r rsync
  • Ask RamHost for a disk space upgrade. This will give you more room for inodes and you will have the full ports tree. Since I needed the kernel source as well I went with this route. The relevant part of the handbook is here.
  • When setting up your drive, specify the number of inodes you need. I tried this at first but when I realized that I needed the kernel source, I got the disk space upgraded and did not run into insufficient inodes issue.
3. I ran into problems while running freebsd-update. Trying to upgrade to 9.1-RELEASE always gave me an error. I asked RamHost about this and they responded that it was due to a KVM issue and that I would not be able to install 9.1-RELEASE on the VPS. I have 9.1-RELEASE on a different KVM based VPS so maybe the problems stems from a specific version of KVM? Since 9.1-RELEASE would not work I went back to the 8.X line. I am running 8.4-RELEASE-p1 on my TinyKVM.

Manas
 
manas said:
1. Yes, you are responsible for setting up the VPS as you see fit. You are given web-based console with which to carry out the installation from the installation disk. There is an unformatted hard drive available so essentially what you get is what you would see if you booted up into a FreeBSD disk with a computer that has a blank hard drive.
2. I do not know if RamHost provides remote copies of the ports tree. I ran into the problem of insufficient inodes for ports tree too. There are three things that you can do:
  • Don't use ports, install using packages. For example pkg_add -r rsync
  • Ask RamHost for a disk space upgrade. This will give you more room for inodes and you will have the full ports tree. Since I needed the kernel source as well I went with this route. The relevant part of the handbook is here.
  • When setting up your drive, specify the number of inodes you need. I tried this at first but when I realized that I needed the kernel source, I got the disk space upgraded and did not run into insufficient inodes issue.
3. I ran into problems while running freebsd-update. Trying to upgrade to 9.1-RELEASE always gave me an error. I asked RamHost about this and they responded that it was due to a KVM issue and that I would not be able to install 9.1-RELEASE on the VPS. I have 9.1-RELEASE on a different KVM based VPS so maybe the problems stems from a specific version of KVM? Since 9.1-RELEASE would not work I went back to the 8.X line. I am running 8.4-RELEASE-p1 on my TinyKVM.

Manas

  1. Hi thanks for the advice. I ended up going for it anyway, so I did figure out on my own that all they give me was an empty box with an ISO.
  2. I went the 'extra disk space' route as well, I was asking them for more disk space because I wanted to host my (rather sizable) git repo there as well. And it was really cheap so I asked them for 6GB more.
    • So I ended up building from ports. Which is well enough, I don't really see myself upgrading things very often, or installing a lot of stuff anyway. Though, I am torn between building from ports/RELENG/9.0 (or wherever it is the ports end up pointing to by default on a -RELEASE based install, it certainly is NOT HEAD) or from ports/HEAD.
  3. I actually just posted on [thread=42388]another thread about this[/thread], since I wanted to get some varying opinions on best practice, not just for this particular instance, but in general.
 
Backupsy has good deals on storage. Although they weren't advertising FreeBSD as an option for their KVM-based storage VPSs, they were offering FreeNAS, so I paid an extra $2 (one-time) for them to add FreeBSD, and now v9.2 is an option among the manual ISO installs!

I have now configured a FreeBSD server with 500MB RAM, 1 CPU, and 250GB storage for which I pay $7/month. The European server location option, which I chose, is Naaldwijk, near Delft, in the Netherlands.

Upload speeds and general response times are entirely adequate, I am running btsync on this server for userland backups of some local machines.
 
Hello,

For a grand total of 12,70 EUR/month I get TransIP Blade VPS for 1024 MB RAM, 1 Intel XEON cpu, 50 GB of space.

I'm happy with their service, you can install a variety of systems among them FreeBSD too. I've been running 9 and now 10 without problems.

regards
 
atmosx said:
Hello,

For a grand total of 12,70 EUR/month I get TransIP Blade VPS for 1024 MB RAM, 1 Intel XEON cpu, 50 GB of space.

I'm happy with their service, you can install a variety of systems among them FreeBSD too. I've been running 9 and now 10 without problems.

regards

Make sure you take advantage of the snapshot feature that TransIP provides. It takes an image of your VPS which you can restore in case of emergency.
 
Eterhost said:
We are offering KVM VPS in Europe complete with DDoS protection with several Operating Systems including FreeBSD 9.2 and 10.0
There's no mention of a monthly datalimit and what the costs are when you go over it. And 100 Mbit is rather low compared to other VPS providers (mine has a 10 Gbps internet connection).
 
Ramnode has FreeBSD 10 available in a KVM http://ramnode.com/

The prices are pretty good as are the features but it's a pretty small shop. I've been using them for some small clients for a few months now. They're pretty responsive with tickets (I had two, neither were their fault), there's an IRC channel everyone hangs out on, so they're pretty accessible and easy to work with.
 
Crow said:
I just bought (today) VPS from hitme.pl and now I'm installing FreeBSD 10 on it. Check their "XEN HVM (iso)" option.

Interesting, but I can't figure out how that works. Are you supposed to install your own ISO on it? How do you do that remotely?
 
I installed FreeBSD using VNC.
FreeBSD is on the list of ISO images, so I just choosed version (9.0, 9.2 and 10.0 are available). If you want to use your own ISO, probably you have to contact with support.
 
Crow said:
I installed FreeBSD using VNC.
FreeBSD is on the list of ISO images, so I just choosed version (9.0, 9.2 and 10.0 are available). If you want to use your own ISO, probably you have to contact with support.

I've never used VNC and don't know anything about it, but I can always learn...

Is the FreeBSD 10.0 ISO the same as you would get here:-

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/

Can you get support in English?
 
For VNC you could use Java applet on VPS control panel (panel is in English). ISO looks exactly the same as that on FreeBSD mirror, but I didn't check MD5 sum.

I'm using this VPS since 7 hours and it's my first contact with hitme.pl, so I can't answer all your questions, but I think their customer support will be more helpful: bok/at/hitme.pl and I think, they handle with English. ;)
 
Vultr VPS supports FreeBSD

I was reviewing DigitalOcean's request for FreeBSD support and one of the users mentioned that vultr is a similar service that supports FreeBSD and allows users to upload their own ISOs if you want to use a different system.

Some highlights from their service:

  • More RAM than DigitalOcean for the same price (768MB for $5 a month)
  • Fast processors (>= 3GHz)
  • Lots of locations
  • Either use SSDs for faster I/O or mechanical drives for larger storage capacities

They also have a referral program ($10 credit if a user pays $10), but I don't think it's right to post such things on an open forum. Please PM me if you'd like to create an account and I'll send you a link with my referral code.

Note: I am not in any way affiliated with vultr. I just found out about them today and thought they looked interesting.
 
I'd like to second the recommendation for Vultr. (http://vultr.com). As beatgammit said, their plans start at $5/month and the first month is free (they give a $5 credit on sign-up). They support most mainstream Linux distros and FreeBSD, plus they allow custom ISOs to be loaded. I've run FreeBSD and TrueOS on their VPSs and it's been smooth sailing. Their customer support has been quick and friendly too when I had questions. So far I'm a happy customer. Vultr has, in my pinion, one of the nicer control panels for managing VPS instances and attacked ISO images.

Like the poster above, I'm not affiliated with Vultr, just happy to find a VPS provider that offers FreeBSD support for a reasonable rate.
 
Hello,

Can any of you guys running FreeBSD on VPS run the following ruby script and report back here results, company the VPS runs on, FreeBSD and Ruby version?

I deployed a Sinatra (ruby-web-framework) on my TransIP hosted FreeBSD server which should fetch info from an API. I wasn't able to run it because calls were talking too long (1+ minutes). After doing some research I discovered that it was because of FreeBSD (generally slower than Linux when it comes to executing Ruby scripts) but (I think) it's also because of the way VPS is deployed on TransIP.

Here is the discussion on the Ruby mailing list for more info. I ended up rolling a 5 USD/month VPS at Digital Ocean running Debian in order to keep the application running. When contacted TransIP support, they told me they solved the problem, but I've had the same kind of issues whatsoever and didn't contact them anymore.

Regards,
 
Code:
FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE-p9
Ruby version: 2.0.0

Using Net::HTTP library
user     system     total     real
0.015625     0.015625     0.031250     (5.093676)

Using OpenURI library
user     system     total     real
0.039062     0.007812     0.046875     (4.929824)
 
VPS runs on hitme.pl.
Code:
FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE-p12
Ruby version: 2.0.0

Using Net::HTTP library
user system total real
0.015625 0.015625 0.031250 ( 9.434748)

Using OpenURI library
user system total real
0.023438 0.023438 0.046875 ( 9.081504)
 
I like the idea of colocation because I may be doing some extensive travel and I need a place to serve-up web pages as well as house my entire home computing life that I can connect remotely to from anywhere.
I been searching colocation options and pricing. The link below is just about the only data center I found willing to go into some details (services, instructions and prices) before providing a quote. Although I appreciate this information I don’t understand why would pay an additional charge to connect to my own server. And if I allow other to connect to my own server I got to pay an addition charge for each person. There’s a lot I don’t understand but this takes the cake. Maybe they think this is going to be a Windows or Linux server that needs C-Panel or something. Could someone please explain? FreeBSD servers don’t need any of this right?
Console Access Users: How Many?
Servers Requiring Console Access: ?
I guest nothing makes sense any more. Like why should I pay to be unlisted when the telephone company will be saving on ink and effort?

I forgot to post the link:
http://www.colocationspace.net/instantcolocationpricequote.cfm
 
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