What is your Service Level Agreement (SLA)? 99,9% availability
What can I do with my servers? The real question is: what not? You are free to deploy your instance for development, testing or production use as a webserver, build server, application server or anything else. You will get full root operating system access and can use your instances for anything you want as long as your activities and content remain within the legal boundaries of the law.
What is the difference between a Dedicated or Virtual Private Server (VPS) and your service? Dedicated servers are actual physical machines, which means you need to pay for the whole machine regardless of the height of your workload and you do not get the benefits of virtualization like snapshots, resizing, self service, autoscaling and easy recovery. A VPS, though providing the benefits of virtualization is still a single, isolated server. It does not come with advanced, internal and load balancing, virtual networking capabilities which means it does not scale and is not suitable for building clusters. Though both are very useful for certain workloads, our service provide more flexibility and scalability.
What is the difference between Managed Hosting and your service? We offer infrastructure services, like servers. We believe our clients are best suited for installing services onto those servers and administrating them. With Managed Hosting, or Managed Services, the service provider offers to configure and administrate the consumed infrastructure. Though such a service has it's advantages, it comes with higher costs, less flexibility and less ondemand self service.
Why do your instance flavors have such small disks compared to other Cloud providers? Most of our instances have one 20 gigabyte ephemeral disk, which is plenty to support an operating system and the additional software for your services. Though other services provide ephemeral disks up to hundreds of gigabytes we have two main reasons why we have chosen not to:
Ephemeral disks are not intended for persistent data. It is intended to be immutable so the instance can run anywhere and can easily be rebuilt. Object storage or block storage volumes should be used for storing all important data. Keeping the ephemeral disk small encourages our customers to use object storage and volumes.
Our compute platform does not support incremental instance backups, only snapshots. Snapshotting an instance to an image is a slow process, as it currently includes copying the full raw disk across our network several time. This means the bigger the ephemeral disk, the longer the snapshot takes to complete. Though we are working on fixing this we encourage the use of volumes, as our volume system already supports handling snapshots and backups from the storage system in stead of copying it across the network.
Do you offer managed hosting? No, our focus is on providing the servers. Our customers are responsible for using and administrating them. We recommend team up with an IT outsourcing provider if you wish to consume fully managed servers.
How can I control my servers? You can create, update and remove servers using our dashboard, API or orchestration templates. The dashboard has an integrated console and our standard images provide SSH access to the servers.
Can I upgrade a specific server? Yes you can, but not without shutting down the server first. Once you have adjusted the plan you can restart your server. Downgrading and upgrading is done per server, which means it does not depend on your overall subscription.
Can I upgrade my storage without upgrading the entire plan? Yes and no. The amount of ephemeral storage is directly linked to the instance plan, but you can add any additional amount of storage you want to an instance by creating and connecting a persistant storage disk.
Can I transfer an instance to another account? No, this is currently not supported.
Can I use my own server images? Yes. Before uploading your image please make sure it is OpenStack compliant in order for it to work.
How do I close my account? You can close your account through our customer dashboard. Please be aware that closing your account will result in all your instances being terminated and all your images, snapshots, persistant storage volumes, object storage data and backups being permanently erased from our systems.
How can I contact support? Through the ticketing system on our support portal.
Do you create automatic backups? No we do not. Our volume service has a backup option and we store data redundantly within our facility, but we do not maintain automatic incremental backups of your data or instances. We do encourage customers to make their own backups as they see fit for their workloads.
Do I need domain names for my servers? No you do not. A domain name is not required for our services to work but if you want to you are free to attach (sub)domain names to the public IP address(es) that you link to your instances or load balancers.
Do you offer a Domain Name Service? Not yet, but your domain name registar does. An integrated DNS service is very high on our compute service roadmap and we expect to add it to our service portfolio very soon!
Does your service have an API? Yes, we have a full set of open standard API's, based on OpenStack. You can read all about them in our library.
I need to set up a server cluster. How do I best scale my servers? The foundation of scaling is provided by the several different “server plans” that we offer to handle different types of server loads. You can use a cost effective small plan for small applications and a big plan for computational or memory intensive applications. The recommended setup for applications is to scale out in stead of up. We recommend building a robust infrastructure by spreading your application over many smaller servers in stead of one or a few large servers. Creating high availability infrastructures includes planning for failure and this design filosophy helps to keep your application available even if one or a few servers happen to go down. It also enables you to scale up faster during peaks in your business!
What is the difference between ephemeral storage and block storage? Basically ephemeral storage is a fixed part of the server while block storage behaves like a removable external disk volume. Ephemeral storage exists only while its instance exists, and is only available to that instance. If you terminate the instance then its ephemeral storage gets removed with it. The most basic use for ephemeral storage is to host the operating system. Block storage is a separate storage volume that you can attach to and detach from any of your instances whenever you want, though it should only be attached to one instance at a time. It is also persistent – you can create and terminate block storage volumes separate from compute instances and they do not get removed automatically when you terminate the instance that it was attached to. We recommend you use block volumes to store all your application data, databases and other business critical information.
Is ServerBiz subject to the US Patriot Act? No absolutely not. The Patriot Act affects all companies that are headquartered or operate in the USA. ServerBiz has no physical presence in the USA and is thus not subject to it. We are subject to Dutch law only.
Can ServerBiz be subject to secret subpoenas? No definitely not. These subpoenas require companies to hand over customer data while at the same time prohibiting them from informing their client about it are used in the USA but are not used in The Netherlands.
Where are my servers and data hosted? In The Netherlands only.
How are resources charged? Billing occurs digitally and on a monthly basis.
Do you charge for bandwidth usage? We charge for outbound traffic only. Both inbound traffic and all internal traffic between your servers is free of charge!
Are there additional fees for licenses? No. All services are charged for actual use as listed. There are no additional fees.
Do I still have to pay for my servers that are powered off? Partially. You are not charged the operating fee for powered off servers, but you will still have to pay for consumed diskspace and associated floating IP addresses.
What forms of payment do you accept? Credit card, Bank transfer and PayPal.
