• Arch Linux 2010.05 64-bit Minimal
• Arch Linux 2010.05 32-bit Minimal

You can reinstall your VPS from Hypanel and choose an Arch Linux template. New customers can also choose Arch Linux this on the order form.

In order to have the server nodes run smoothly we’ve implemented a CPU feature that kicks in whenever a node has less than 10-20% of idle CPU and will limit your processor hungry neighbors.

We’ve also increased the disk storage space allocated to each VPS. For instance VPS Start disk storage was increased from 20 GB to 30 GB, check the home page for the modified packages – intovps.com.

All existing VPS’s have already been upgraded. You don’t need to restart your VPS. In fact, you don’t need to do anything but enjoy the new power and storage.

Existing customers can reinstall their VPS from Hypanel or can follow the upgrade steps. New customers can choose the operating system template in the order form.

You can also reinstall your VPS yourself anytime from Hypanel at no extra cost and choose one of our 30 OS templates.

Join us at:

• IRC Server: irc.freenode.net
• IRC Channel: #intovps

Some other tools will be released later this year.

We’ve just updated Hypanel, our home baked VPS control panel, with the following new graphs:

• number of disk writes and reads
• data volume written and read to/from the disk
• bandwidth graph with in/out
• number of network packets in/out
• % CPU usage
• number of processes+threads
• number of used sockets
• send and receive TCP buffer (bytes)
• used kernel memory

All these are graphs and monitoring period can be customized per hour (current hour, last hour, 2 hours ago etc.), per day (today, yesterday, etc.) or per month.

Anyways, here’s the basic list:

1. Use strong passwords. Your passwords must have at least 8 characters (preferably more) and include all of the following: small and upper case letters, numbers and a few special signs, like: !@#$%^&*()_+{}|:”?><[]\’;/,. Or setup keys for SSH authentication. This applies for the root passwords, Hypanel account password and any user account from your VPS.
2. Update your server. First time you login to SSH you should update your system (yum update in CentOS and alike, apt-get upgrade in Ubuntu and alike). The OS template that was used when deploying your system may not be up to date. Although we’re trying to keep all OS templates up to date, doing this for 30+ templates and tweaking new releases for OpenVZ is quite some work.
3. And keep your server up to date. Make sure you update frequently or set up an update daemon/cron.
4. Disable all daemons/services that you don’t need. For instance, if you need just VPN, it doesn’t make sense to run a mail server or web server. This will reduce the attack surface on your server and you won’t be affected by some of the software vulnerabilities. And you’ll have more memory available for the system processes that you need .
5. Don’t give your root password to people you don’t know or don’t trust. We had some incidents with customers that picked up some guy on some forum which “secured” his VPS. Turned out that the “security guy” just wanted a machine for spamming.
6. Consider changing the default ports. For instance for SSH configure port 2421 (this is just a random number that cropped up from my keyboard ), instead of default 22. But don’t rely on this too much, while some of the automatic bots that do brute force will try just on port 22, there’s no excuse for having a weak password.

Again, this is just a basic list. Talk to a professional system administrator if you don’t have the knowledge or you don’t have the time.

What is your  basic security check list?

Full details have been emailed and you can also check the (freshly released) Announcements section in your Hypanel account. For customers that haven’t received the email and they don’t have the message in their Hypanel account it means they’re on some other server and are not affected by this maintenance operations .  Anyways, you can email support if you want to find out on what hardware node you’re located on or if you have any other questions.

• sales@ continues to be a public email address that any pre-sales questions should be sent to.
• support@ and billing@ are now private email addresses. This means that they will accept emails only from registered customers’ email addresses. Any email sent from a non-registered customer email will be discarded!

This allows us to be more efficient in handling tickets: your hosting account and your VPS-es will be identified in a second by our support staff (don’t forget to mention VPS host name or main IP address if you have more than one VPS with us), we can quickly see the history of the customer that’s sending the support request and so on.

Just use the email address that you’ve registered with and you’ll be fine. In case you want other email addresses to be associated with your hosting account (and receive support when writing from these other email addresses) add the email address(es) in your billing account:

• login to your IntoVPS billing account at  https://secure.intovps.com/
• click on “My Details” link at the top of the page
• then click on “Add New Contact”
• fill in the contact details and make sure you check “Support Emails – Allow this user to open tickets in your account” option in “Email Preferences” field. Check other options like sending invoices to this contact etc. if applies.

LATER EDIT: sales@ email adress has become queries @.

• Archlinux 11.09
• Slackware 13.0
• Ubuntu 9.10

We’re currently working on Pardus and TurnKey. Looks like Pardus is not compatible with the OpenVZ kernel, we’re still working to find a solution.

If you’re interested in other Linux distributions let us know.