Tech specs
We use quality server solutions from Supermicro incorporating RAID-1 or 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 Cisco-based network with direct connectivity to over 40 peers at LoNAP.
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
- Debian Etch
- Debian Lenny
- Debian Sid
- Gentoo Linux 2006.1
- Ubuntu Dapper (6.06)
- Ubuntu Hardy (8.04)
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.
- 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.