We have answers for all your BSD hosting needs.

Are your services Guaranteed?

All of our VPS packages are backed by our 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. We are so confident in our services that if you aren't completely satsfied for any reason, just let us know within 30 days and we will give you a 100% refund.

How much do you charge for bandwidth overages?

Our standard bandwidth overage rate is $0.25 per GB. We also offer an upgrade to an additional 1000GB/mo for $75/mo. Please open a support ticket if you would like to take advantage of this upgrade.

Do you allow IRC, torrents?

We do not allow IRC servers, bittorrent, open proxies, or any other software that can degrade our network performance or allow for abuse.

Is there a setup fee or cancellation fee?

We do not charge any setup fees or cancellation fees. All prices advertised are for monthly service with no commitment required beyond the first month. Some competitors advertise prices that are only applicable if you signup for 1 year of service, but all of our prices are month-to-month.

What forms of payment do you accept?

We accept Visa, MasterCard and American Express credit cards. We also accept PayPal payments as well.

Where are your servers located?

Our servers are located in Durham, North Carolina and Dallas, Texas, USA.

What is a virtual private server (VPS)?

A virtual private server is a just like a real, physical server in that it has its own network interface, memory, IP addresses, and hard disk, but instead of running directly on a physical system a virtual private server runs as an application within a special operating system known as a hypervisor. This hypervisor runs multiple virtual servers on a single physical system which allows them to be sold for much less than a equivalent dedicated machine.

What virtualization technology do you use?

We use the Xen hypervisor along with an in-house suite of management tools to provision and run all of our virtual private servers. Xen is an open source hypervisor with good performance and excellent security and stability.

What are the limitations of a VPS?

Unlike some of our competitors, our FreeBSD VPS's are fully virtualized systems which make no limitations on what you can do with them. A rule of thumb is that if you can do with with FreeBSD on a physical system you can do it with a RootBSD VPS. If you have any specific questions about what can and cannot be done with a RootBSD VPS, feel free to contact us.

How many websites can I host on a VPS?

Since each VPS has its own complete operating system and application environment, there are no hard limits on the number of databases, email addresses or websites hosted. The only limits come into play when the resources are heavily used and start to use up most of the memory or hard disk space provisioned in a VPS. When that happens, we can rapidly upgrade your VPS to a higher package with minimal downtime and interruption.

Do I have root access on my VPS?

Yes, all virtual servers do come with full root access. This allows you to configure any setting on the server, add extra software and even compile your own software.

How secure is a VPS?

Compared to other hosting options such as shared hosting, a VPS is generally more secure than shared hosting, and this is certainly true for the VPSs provided by RootBSD. Our virtualization technology ensures that each VPS is completely isolated from all other VPSs so that one VPS is unable to affect any other at a network or hardware level. And since all of our VPSs run FreeBSD you have the ability to tune you security to precisely match your needs.

Do you offer IPv6 service?

Currently we do not offer native IPv6 service. However, you can setup a 6to4 tunnel through various tunnel brokers (such as HE or SixXS) to connect to the IPv6 Internet. We do plan to offer native IPv6 service in the future, but no expected date has been set.

What software is available on a VPS?

Each VPS comes with a base installation of FreeBSD. This includes standard Unix utilities and commands as well as the full FreeBSD ports collection. The ports collection easily allows users and administrators to install over 17,000 different free software packages that have been specifically customized for the FreeBSD environment. Practically every software package needed to run a robust web, mail and database server environment is available in the ports collection.

What about a control panel for administering a VPS?

All RootBSD virtual servers include a basic web-based administration tool called RootCP. RootCP allows you to start, stop and reboot your VPS as well as troubleshoot standard operating issues. However, RootCP does not interfere with the software running inside your VPS and cannot be used for managing your web or mail server.

How long does it take to setup a new VPS?

All VPS orders are manually verified in order to prevent fraudulent orders. New VPSs are setup within 24 hours, although usually it only takes a few hours for this process.

Can FreeBSD be upgraded?

Yes, the FreeBSD OS can be upgraded in-place in a Xen VPS. These systems may be upgraded just like a dedicated system, as outlined in the FreeBSD Handbook.

Can my VPS package be upgraded?

Yes, a VPS can be upgraded. Upgrades are done between packages and be handled in one of two ways. In both methods bandwidth and memory are upgraded and take effect after power cycling the VPS. To upgrade disk we can either create a new virtual disk with the difference in space between your current and new plan, or we can provision a disk for the full size of the new plan and migrate your existing data to the new disk. The first options only requires the VPS be power cycled (less than 5 minutes downtime) while the second option results in approximately 1 hour of downtime while data is migrated between the old and new disk.

Is it possible to put the NIC in promiscuous mode?

Yes, you can use promiscouos mode on the network card in order to view Ethernet frames. This can be used for network security tools such as snort to analyze your network traffic. The NIC of a VPS will not see traffic of any other VPSs, due to the network restrictions we have in place.

Can I setup a firewall?

Since our VPSs run a fully functional installation of FreeBSD all firewalling options available in FreeBSD (ipfw, pf, etc.) are available to be used in our VPSs. If you would like a firewall to be setup on your system when we provision it, make a note in the order and we will make sure one is setup before you received the system information.

How do I get additional IP addresses?

You may request additional IP addresses for your VPS by opening a support ticket or during the order process. Additional IP addresses are billed $1/mo per address. Additional IP requests are subject to manual review and must meet the justification requirements of ARIN.

What is the partitioning scheme?

For our Iota and Lambda plans the partition scheme we use is to allocate twice the amount of memory for swap and leave the rest for the root partition. For all larger plans we use the default scheme used by the FreeBSD installer. If you would like to use a different partitioning scheme please see below.

Do you offer custom partitioning?

Yes we will be glad to follow your custom partitioning scheme when setting up your VPS. Just indicate your preference in the order comments. Be sure to include swap. We recommend a swap space size of 2x RAM.

Do you have an uptime guarantee?

We do not have a formal uptime guarantee however our historical uptime over the last 2 years exceeds 99.9%. Most of our customers are on monthly plans, so delivering reliable service is critical to retaining our customers.