Log in and set up a VPS or two.

[Jim]

The next few threads outline what it takes to get a VPS up and running.
Our method is a little different than the usual VPS plan in that we set you up one level above a VPS which gives the abiltiy to create one or more VPS's instead of only having access to the VPS layer itself. That's one reason these are better.

Live Demos
Hostinabox (Similar to cPanel but designed for vps servers)
HyperVM (used to create vps servers)

[Jim]

Log in to the control panel at the address we sent you in the welcome email.

[Jim]

This is the page you should see after logging in.

[Jim]

Once clicking the home tab, there will be many more things to look at.

[Jim]

Like the reseller accounts a plan needs to be set up first. This way when you create a VPS, you will have a predefined plan to choose.

[Jim]

This is where the rubber meets the road. Create the first VPS. Some fields are left blank because the server will choose them automatically.

Current operating system choices are:
centos-4-i386-afull [117.86MB]
centos-4-i386-default [117.86MB]
centos-4-i386-hostinabox23 [565.95MB]
centos-4-i386-minimal [32.94MB]
centos-4-x86_64-default [138.78MB]
centos-5-i386-afull [122.37MB]
debian-3.1-i386-minimal [42.33MB]
fedora-core-3-i386-default [105.47MB]
fedora-core-4-i386-afull [157.76MB]
fedora-core-4-i386-default [114.27MB]
fedora-core-5-i386-afull [126.47MB]
gentoo-20060317-i686-stage3 [106.49MB]
opensuse-10-i386-default [90.32MB]
suse-9.3-x86_64 [155.26MB]
ubuntu-6.06-i386-minimal [59.98MB]

[Jim]

Once clicking the ADD button, the server will get the OS Image you chose, unzip it, and create a server out of it. The time involved depends on the size OS you choose. Hostinabox is the largest at 500+MB but unzippped to about 1.3GB. That process takes 1-5 minutes. Refresh the page every minute or so to see if it is finished.

Note - when testing this we found that refreshing every few seconds breaks the VPS. It's better to just get a cup of coffee and check in a couple of minutes. Unless you want a broken VPS.

[Jim]

Once it is set up it can be controlled individually through the control panel. Everything from looking at the bandwidth graphs, to rebooting it is done through this screen. It can also be reset back to the basic install through this screen.

Resetting it deletes everything it it. If there is something you need to save - save it to your computer BEFORE resetting the VPS, because it will be gone forever.

Also - VPS technology has just made it to production in CentOS 5. It has been around for a while but finally considered stable enough for RedHat to stand behind. Note - it is considered "stable enough". This means that by clicking around wildly you can break a VPS beyond repair. It will be a good two years before it becomes more or less idiot proof and un-breakable. Keep that in mind and tread lightly. On the bright side when RedHat marks an app as stable it means that it has been fully tested through the Fedora branch and ready for use in an enterprise environment.

Every OS (of the several to choose from) is set up as an image which you choose from. We do not have support for XEN, even though it is a choice in the control panel. XEN is a more virtualized environment with hard limits. Hard limits tend to break more apps, and we chose to allow soft limits only, such as burstable RAM usage, and burstable cpu usage. To do this effectively requires that machines aren't overloaded. So we set up fewer users on more standard machines as opposed to packing a lot of users on large expensive machines.

In the future we will implement "Live Migrate" which will allow you to move VPS's from one physical machine to another with the click of a mouse. It is part of this control panel now but doesn't work well yet, so it is disabled.

If you are reading this, and wondering how to order, and Monday June 18, 2007 hasn't passed yet these can be ordered at this link until it is integrated into the regular order forms. Right now two host machines are online. One is offline waiting on RAM, and one is offline and a pile of parts so there is plenty of space (4 total).