The quotas are now as follows:
Iota = 20GB
Lambda = 30GB
Omicron = 40GB
Sigma = 60GB
Omega = 120GB

Additional backup space can also be purchased for $0.12 per GB per month.

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.

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.

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

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.

VPS is an acronym for “virtual private server,” which is a method of partitioning physical computer servers into multiple servers. Each partition virtually has the appearance and capabilities of a dedicated server without requiring the space and expense of a separate physical machine. Each VPS has its own operating system (in our case, FreeBSD), and programs run independently inside that system. So what are the advantages of such a system?

(1) Cost-Effective. Since multiple systems are in the same physical hardware, a VPS offers significant cost savings over a dedicated physical server.

(2) Total Access and Customization. As a VPS customer, you have root access to the system, and can therefore manipulate and configure all aspects of the server to your specifications. You can run the applications of your choosing!

(3) Enhanced Security. With traditional shared webhosting, all users share an operating system and have access to the same file system. Therefore, the potential exists for users to access each other’s information or affect the performance of another user’s system. With a VPS, there is an additional layer of security in that all users have their own separate operating systems and file systems even though they are sharing physical space on the machine.

Overall, a VPS can provide you with the freedom that comes with peace of mind, control, and knowing that you have freed up financial resources for use elsewhere. If you already have a busy website, a VPS is a great upgrade from traditional hosting without having to shell out the additional dough for a dedicated server. A VPS is also great for backing up data on your own off-site secure server. Whatever the use, a VPS is something to try–the functionality of having your own dedicated machine without the expense!

open up /etc/rc.conf in your favorite editor

You should see a line that looks like this:

 ifconfig_re0=”inet 208.86.12.141  netmask 255.255.255.224″

Leave this line alone.  You can add your IP aliases in this fashion:

ifconfig_re0_alias0=”inet 208.86.13.50 netmask 255.255.255.255″
ifconfig_re0_alias1=”inet 208.86.13.51 netmask 255.255.255.255″

and so on.

Note that the netmask of alias IP addresses is always 255.255.255.255 (/32).  This keeps the network setup simple overall since only the first IP address has to have a broadcast and ARP entries.

Once the entries are in, reboot so you can make sure that they come up on boot properly.  You should now be able to ping your alias IPs from an outside host, assuming that you don’t have a firewall setup blocking ping traffic.

If you need additional IP addresses, you can request them by opening up a support ticket.  As always, we are available to assist you with this setup.  But you will probably find that it is easier than expected.   Please let us know if you have any questions.

We have made some upgrades to memory limits on our FreeBSD VPS service. Our entry-level plan, Iota, now comes with 256MB of RAM, quite a deal for only $19.97 including our best in class server hardware and capable FreeBSD 6.2 OS setup.

All of our VPS plans received memory upgrades, which applies immediately to existing customers as well. for only a $29.97/mo you can step up to our Lambda VPS plan with a whopping 512MB of RAM to let you run plenty of web apps.

Reboot 

The binaries for the scripts are called “reboot”, “halt” (these are direct replacements for their normal counterparts).  Once you halt your VPS, you will need to login to RootCP to start it up again since you will be, well, locked out of your shell.

Resource Usage 

To see your RAM usage:  jmemstat

To see your disk usage:  jdiskstat

Do you have ideas for other improvements we could make?  Send them to us!  Have a problem?  Drop an email to support@rootbsd.net and let us know.