Virtual Private Servers (KVM & OpenVZ) :: East London, South Africa

You could have access to a standard Linux VPS in less than 1hr (perhaps a little longer over weekends) - before you've even had to pay!

Testimonial

In the odd eight years since the start of our small financial services business we've moved from a complete desktop computer for every one of our administrative staff, to desktop virtualization, to a full client-server infrastructure (one for each of our three offices distributed across the Eastern Cape) and then finally to a Virtual Private Server (VPS). While each migration was prompted by a combination of potential savings in cost or effort, it was really the savings in time and effort - of setting up and maintaining multiple users on multiple machines - that lead to a decision to explore an alternative setup. The productivity gains brought about by saving in time and effort on a VPS cannot be quantified and proved to be invaluable for our small business where the owner is also the IT technician, the accountant, the human resources manager, etc., and most of the users have fairly limited computer skills. Very few infrastructure architectures can match convenience of having only one machine to set-up, having only one set of users, one set of application software installations and one repository of shared resources and business documents.

The guys at CIS were with us from the client-server stage and suggested the move to a VPS when our context changed. Despite an awareness of some risk as we were one of their first clients, a 100% uptime in about 18 months means that they have never dropped the ball. Our experience with both the VPS as well as the support from CIS is extremely positive and comes highly recommended.

Markus Mostert
CC

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We support both:

Operating System virtualisation (using OpenVZ). This is flexbile and cheap, but won't work is all situations. We have ready made templates for CentOS 5, Debian 6.0 (squeeze) and Ubuntu Lucid.

We use this technology to host our Asterisk IPBX products.
not suitable for Windows hosting or if you intend to run Java applications.
will be delivered with the basics set up and a single IP address. Webmin can be installed if required to allow remote administration. Cost are from R1950pa for 512MB RAM and 15GB diskspace.

and Native virtualisation (using KVM). This is more expensive, but will host any operating system required i.e. Windows Small Business Server essentials or any version of Linux. We can not publish pricing for this since 3rd party licenses might be required. Please contact us with details for a quote. We support the Virtio drivers for increased performance.

Virtual Private Servers

Our VPSs are a premium service charged at a competitive price - we need these services internally to supply other aspects of our business so the work is already done for you to enjoy too.

You should choose us for Performance and after sales service without the premium cost. (When you run into trouble with your VPS we're only an email away, we're experts and we can help).

VPS Advice - Buying Guidelines

When buying or leasing a VPS you are in effect buying these components:-

Bandwith: Is there enough for your needs and is the device located physically close to your users? If there is a large physical distance (many cheap providers are located in the US) things will be less responsive. Depending on what you're hosting this could matter, or it might not.
- Our servers are in a Tier4 data center only 2ms from the London INternet eXchange point (LINX) with more than 20Gbps redundant access.
RAM: A VPS can show that it has 512MB of memory, but this might not be instantly available when your VPS needs it. Much like airlines oversell plane tickets a VPS host can over sell RAM by swapping your applications to disk. This has the effect that things could be up to 100X slower until some RAM is freed up and the your application is swapped back in.
- Our servers have more than enough RAM, and in fact do not even have swap memory allocated.
CPU: This is the most easily over sold component since in most environments it is the least used. The key is to ensure that computational tasks are responsive - perhaps log the time it takes to run certain key functions to ensure you're not on an overloaded host.
- We operate Dual Quad core Intel Xeon servers and would be happy to show CPU utilisation graphs to prove we have the reasouces to accommodate you.
Hard drives: Hard drives start writing data on the outer edge of their platters, data access here is almost 1.5X faster than toward the inside.
- We ensure that when more than 50% of our drive space is used we move data onto another drive.