This promotion has expired. All of our promotions can be found here.

For November, we’re going to match your first month of purchases up to $50.

To be eligible for this promotion, open an account between November 1st and December 1st of 2011 and purchase services by December 1st.  We’ll match your spending up to $50 for the entire month.

For example, open an account and:

• Spend $30 and we’ll deposit an additional $30.
• Spend $50 and we’ll deposit additional $50.
• Spend $100 and we’ll deposit additional $50.

To receive your credit, please email support@ after opening an account and purchasing services.

We’ve prettied up the site! And, tried to better make the case that our platform is:

• Easy to use
• Powered by fast CPU and fast disk
• Windows friendly
• Quick to the Internet, thanks to Internap

We’d also like to thank the team at (a)squaredstudio, the fine people responsible for our sartorial grace. It is by their design sense, common sense, and enduring patience, that our site keeps getting better.

What if you’ve already purchased a Windows license? Or, what if you want to run a version of Windows other than those we offer? In either case, you might elect to bring your own OS.

I’m going to demonstrate how to upload an ISO and install from it. For this example, I’m going to use Windows 7. But, these instructions should get you through the installation of any OS. They are, in fact, how we upload our pre-installed images.

While we have decent selection of Linux and Windows pre-installed servers available, there are enough Linux builds to fill a Panamax freighter with DVDs. And, while we have Windows servers, we’ve only a few and they require that you pay the licensing costs through us.

Continue reading “API Quickies – Bring Your Own Windows” »

This post might also be called, “How to Install Cygwin for Use With Open Hosting’s API…” Cygwin is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows. And, it is the easiest path to our API from a Windows machine. A correctly installed and configured Cygwin will allow you to exercise the entire API library just as easily from Windows as from Linux or OSX. There are three parts to this tutorial: installing Cygwin, installing the API scripts, and configuring a Cygwin session to connect with the API.

Continue reading “API Quickies – The API and Windows” »

We’ve added two more pre-installed images to our library: Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS Desktop and Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS Server. As with the other pre-install images, you need only to create a server and the Open Hosting platform will implicitly create a drive with the OS already installed.

The desktop installation takes a few minutes, because it requires a drive of at least 4GBs for installation. This is a kitchen sink build, which includes the desktop and office and most every package.

The server Installation, on the other hand, takes less than a minute, and no more than 1GB is required for a healthy install. Like our other pre-install systems, it is a minimal build.

As with all the other pre-installed images:

1. The VNC password is platform-generated and found near your server.
2. When connecting by VNC, you can login by typing “root” without providing a password.
3. The root user is disabled for SSH and other remote access.
4. For accessing by SSH, use the toor user and enter the VNC password.

We’ve increased the maximum RAM allocation to 16GB. So, you may now create servers by the control panel or by the API with as much as 16GB of RAM.