Often, we’re asked: why Open Hosting over Amazon’s AWS? And our answer begins with the two design principles that define our service:
 

1. Cloud servers that behave like real server: Our platform can be understood using familiar terms: server, drive, IP address, public network, and private network. This familiar vocabulary promotes easy adoption and easy migration.

 

2. An open source foundation and an open outlook: Built on Linux-LVM, our platform will run your software without modification. Upload an existing server, upload an ISO, or start from scratch with a pre-installed system: however you start, we provide an execution environment designed to accommodate software without modification. And, as easy as it is to deploy infrastructure with Open Hosting, it’s just as easy to download your servers and go elsewhere.

 

Continue reading “Refugees from the Amazon” »

** Successfully Completed** – Just in time for spring cleaning, Open Hosting is upgrading several network switches and power units at our facility in Miami. This upgrade will result in disruptions to both public and private network infrastructure: your servers will have their connections to the Internet and to their VLANs disrupted. In addition, the host servers will be rebooted, which will in turn reboot your servers.

The scheduled network downtime is from April 20th at 10PM EST to April 20th at 11PM EST, during which period your servers will be unavailable and rebooted once. We don’t expect to need the entire hour, and will make every effort to ensure a quick upgrade.

This is our first planned downtime at East1 for 2012 and we hope it is the last. Yet, with the new gear comes some immediate benefits:
 

• an additional level of network redundancy
• faster public network interface
• faster private network interface for VLANs
• additional network protections from things like DOS attacks
• lays the foundation for some exciting new features and possibilities…

Around these parts, we eat our own dog food. The dashboard, for example, interacts with the API just as you might. Consider the drive copy command, which is triggered by clicking the yellow “copy” button on any unmounted drive.

Continue reading “API Quickies – How to Copy a Drive” »

Among the first things you should do after deploying Windows at Open Hosting is enable our platform firewall and enable Microsoft Remote Desktop. Continue reading “Windows Security & Remote Desktop” »

This applies to both our pre-installed Windows builds and Windows servers you’ve uploaded yourself. In other words, all Windows. These particular directions were written using Windows 2008 Server. Continue reading “Windows Servers: Disk Resizing” »

Our pre-installed servers make disk resizing very easy. To resize a disk on which an Open Hosting pre-installed Linux server is installed, it is necessary to first resize it from Open Hosting’s dashboard. Continue reading “Pre-installed Linux Servers: Disk Resizing” »