Tech specs

We use quality server solutions from Supermicro incorporating RAID-10 storage.

Servers

London, UK

BitFolk's servers are located in Telehouse North in London's Docklands area, one of the UK's premier datacentres and considered to be the country's main hub of the Internet. These are personally maintained on-site.

Our servers have gigabit connectivity provided by Jump Networks. Jump operates a redundant Cisco-based network with gigabit connections to LINX, and transit from NTT, KPN, and Datahop.

Native IPv6 connectivity is supplied by default.

Xen

Our virtual machines run under the Xen virtual machine monitor. Xen is a technology which lets an x86 machine run multiple other virtual x86 machines ("domains") with close-to-native performance. This effectively allows us to provision multiple complete x86 servers running from each real server.

Our servers are closely monitored to ensure they are not overloaded. We never knowingly oversell our services, and when changing load patterns result in short-term overloading we rebalance as necessary. Check out the loading of some of our servers (click to get a bigger image):

Available Linux distributions

Currently available for use as VPS images:

• CentOS 5.x
• CentOS 6.x
• Debian squeeze (6.x)
• Debian wheezy (testing)
• Debian sid
• Scientific Linux 6.x
• Ubuntu Lucid (10.04 LTS)
• Ubuntu Maverick (10.10)
• Ubuntu Natty (11.04)
• Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10)
  Please note: vendor security support for Maverick (10.10) ends in April 2012, for Natty (11.04) in October 2012 and for Oneiric (11.10) in April 2013. If you do not intend to upgrade your OS before then, you may wish to choose 10.04.x LTS which is supported until April 2015.

Other distributions are possible but require some effort on our part. If you are capable of providing your own Xen-compatible filesystem image then this is also a possibility. Please contact support with your requirements.

Shared resources

There are certain shared resources available in order to help ease load on your own VPS:

• DNS - resolvers are supplied for customer use. If you aren't running your own nameserver then you can use these in your /etc/resolv.conf. If you are then you can use them as forwarders.
• NTP - Our list of recommended NTP servers includes our own servers plus those of our upstreams. These servers only use nearby public servers themselves, but using them should save you bandwidth, reduce load on the public servers and be generally more reliable.
• apt cache - Do all your package updates through our apt cache and experience faster updates at no bandwidth cost to you. See the Debian-specific customer information page for more information. Works for Ubuntu too!
• CentOS mirror - If CentOS is your thing then you can get your package updates from our mirror too.
• SpamAssassin - We provide multiple spamd servers to take the load off your VPS. You will not be able to influence the settings of either spamd, but you may find it useful as running your own spamd tends to eat up a lot of RAM and is not a realistic prospect at all in less than 128M RAM.