Category Archives: VPS
FreeBSD 8.0 now available
Date published: December 3rd, 2009
Posted in Announcements, FreeBSD, RootBSD, VPS | No Comments »
Hello all,
RootBSD is pleased to announce that FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE is now available on all of our Xen VPS Products. If you are an existing customer and need help upgrading to the latest release, please let us know, we will be happy to assist you with the upgrade.
Don’t forget we are still running several promotions on our products page.
An Introduction to the RootBSD Knowledgebase
Date published: July 6th, 2009
Posted in Announcements, RootBSD, VPS | No Comments »
For a while now RootBSD has maintained a modest knowledgebase for its customers which is accessible by clicking Support from our website. Here you will find answers to questions that are common in support tickets, as well as information about procedures concerning your VPS. We just recently added a new entry titled Getting started with your VPS which gives some pointers to getting familiar with your new FreeBSD VPS.
We would like to expand our knowledgebase to include more in-depth information as well as new information that could be of use to our customers. We’d love to hear about your thoughts and ideas as to what would be good to have articles about, as well as how we can improve any existing content. Feel free to leave a comment on this post or, if you’d prefer, just open a support ticket with us to share your opinions.
Another look at FreeBSD 8
Date published: June 24th, 2009
Posted in FreeBSD, RootBSD, VPS | No Comments »
A customer recently linked us to a blog post, http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html (link broken as of 02/28/2016), that gives a really good look at what there is to come in the up-and-coming version 8 of the FreeBSD operating system. It looks like the FreeBSD developers have been busy and there are a number of new features which caught our eye.
First, as a company which provides FreeBSD VPSs running on Xen the support for running FreeBSD as a paravirtualized guest in Xen is of major interest to us. We currently run our VPSs using Xen’s support for full virtualization (known as HVM mode in Xen lingo). This mode allows unmodified guest operating systems to run in Xen and is, most familarly, how Windows is support in Xen. Paravirtualized guests however, are ported to run within the Xen hypervisor, and since the guest is designed to operate in Xen and cooperate with the hypervisor the guest can run much more efficiently and quickly. To our customers the greatest boost in performance will be seen in disk and network throughput so we are eagerly anticipating this support in FreeBSD 8.
By the looks of it there will be other improvements in almost every part of FreeBSD. The ULE scheduler which first appeared in FreeBSD 7.0 and became the default with 7.1 has received a number of improvements which will boost performance particularly for the SMP configurations that ULE was designed to handle. The inclusion of stack-smashing protection also gives FreeBSD an edge in security by protecting the system from a number of common exploits used to attack software vulnerabilities. Light weight kernel threads are also to appear in FreeBSD 8 which will mean that kernel threads will consume less resources and be less resource intensive to create and destroy.
Seems like FreeBSD 8 will be another great release for our favorite operating system. For a look at all the other features planned for FreeBSD 8 see the original post at http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html (link broken as of 02/28/2016).
Why FreeBSD?
Date published: July 23rd, 2008
Posted in VPS | No Comments »
Whether or not you are new to the world of VPS’s (perhaps you read our entry a few days ago, “Why VPS?”), you may be wondering what the advantages are of a FreeBSD-based VPS. There are great reasons why many experts in virtual hosting, like RootBSD, have made this choice.
FreeBSD is a free operating system descended from UNIX. Though it is not exactly like UNIX, it does have compliant internals and system API’s. FreeBSD is different than Linux in that all device drivers, userland utilities, the kernel, etc., are all contained in the same source code tracking tree, whereas with Linux they are all developed separately and packaged in various different ways. So what makes FreeBSD particularly good for a VPS?
(1) Software Flexibility. A standard installation of FreeBSD includes standard UNIX utilities and commands as well as the FreeBSD ports collection, which gives access to over 17,000 free software packages that have already been customized for the FreeBSD environment. FreeBSD users will have everything at their fingertips to run web, email, and database server environments. FreeBSD also has excellent third-party software support, so you will be able to pick the applications that suit your needs.
(2 Industry Standard. Over 30% of the Internet is powered by FreeBSD, including huge websites like Yahoo.com and Hotmail.com.
(3) Performance and Reliability. FreeBSD is a “rock solid” platform. You may recall from our previous article about the recent Firefox upgrade that one of Mozilla’s download mirrors was powered by FreeBSD with fantastic results.
(4) Looking Towards the Future. Because of the increasing success and widespread use of FreeBSD, many web hosts and software providers are scaling down their use of other operating systems and focusing on FreeBSD. It is likely that not far down the line there will be considerably more support and applications available than for other operating systems, especially in the world of VPS’s.
(5) Jails. With FreeBSD, you have the option of having a Jail VPS, which results in higher overall performance due to minimal overhead. With the jail feature, VPS’s can be created on the fly and are ideal for new users since they can be configured without complex firewall rules.
FreeBSD has long been considered the unknown giant among operating systems, but is becoming less and less unknown. As VPS’s become more popular and FreeBSD becomes the standard among VPS’s, you can expect to see it heading even farther out of obscurity.