Recently in vps Category

Image via Wikipedia

• Spam Assassin
• DNS Blacklists

• setting email size limits (if you want to block emails based on size)
• SPF settings
• DNS Blackhole (blacklist) settings

Since we launched our VPS hosting a couple of months ago we've been working on adding extra documentation both internally to our wiki and externally to our knowledgebase and websites.

We've recently added a short FAQ for VPS clients which hopefully addresses some of the questions people have.

We'll be adding more content as we can, but if there are any areas that people would like us to focus on please let us know.

I've also added a new VPS section to our forum

Feedback, as usual, is welcome

Image via Wikipedia

Blacknight, Microsoft and PollDaddy provided prizes, with us offering a year's VPS hosting to the winner!

We'll be liasing with Alan to ensure he gets to make full use of his prize :)

We've been toying with the idea of providing "live chat" on our site for quite some time.

We finally found a software vendor whose product fit our criteria, so we're now offering live chat on our VPS hosting site.

All conversations are routed over 128 bit SSL, so your privacy is assured.

We would, of course, ask that people not handover credit card details etc., via the live chat system.

Staff from sales, technical support and accounts are available from 8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday to answer your queries.

Of course if anyone has any feedback to give us either here or via email (management@blacknight.com) we'd love to hear it.

Well it isn't quite Web 2.0. But it's now new and improved and shiny.

And before I get any complaints, we know Safari doesn't look perfect yet :-).

We've removed .net and Linux VPS plans, you now have a simplified version of the site that has VPS plans that are OS agnostic. When you click buy now you'll be able to use our fancy vps-shop web application to choose your OS and the package you want and whether or not you want to add Plesk!

So where is this fancy application I hear you cry. Any buy now link on Blacknightvps.com will now take you to it.

All pricing for each period and for plesk etc is all contained within the web app.

There's a few small issues outstanding that we'll be fixing in time.

1) Safari doesn't work well right now (if at all :/)
2) The initial page load is a little slow, we're aware of this, it's because of the volume of information being retrieved from our backend that causes this, we're working on it.
3) Changing OS doesn't appear to keep your selected options in all browsers. However if you change plan from basic to standard it keeps all your choices!
4) Non javascript users we'll have a more accessible version soon (within a week or two) that'll work particularly well for the visually impaired.

Please let us know what you think of the new simplified version of the site.

All feedback and comments are welcome.

Ok so the one question we've been asked over and over again was:

"How many IPs can I have with my VPS?"

When we launched initially we said 1 IP address.

Then we gave a second free and now we're going to give you up to 10 IPs but the downside is there'll be a small charge for additional IPs.

On our shared hosting you can only get 1 dedicated IP address, so our VPS plans give you more IPs for free for a start and also the ability to add more.

The magical upper limit that we've set is 10 IPs.

Each additional IP (after the 2 we give free!) costs 2 Euro per month.

This fee is an administrative fee and doesn't give you ownership of the IP but rather the ability to make use of it.

It is added to your account for your exclusive use. After you buy them you can click IP addresses in VPS management and click Add new.

The upper limit we'll look at later once the product matures more and people start giving out to me looking for more IPs. :-)

If you'd like to be in with a chance of getting a year's VPS hosting for free, check out the Web 2.0 Ireland blog.

They've recently redone their site's design, so they're running a logo competition.

We've been getting tonnes of feedback from customers over the past couple of weeks since our VPS product launch. As Michele has posted previously we've had lots of requests for other distros. Mostly our issues with these is cramming them all onto the website. We're building an app behind the scenes to make it easier to choose the type of VPS you wanted along with the distro, OS of your choosing.

Since that'll be a few days before it's complete I've a few URLs to allow people to go in and signup for their VPS.

OpenSuse 10.3 can be purchase here.
Ubuntu 7.04 can be purchased here.
Fedora Core 7 can be purchased here.

You can navigate to different periods from within the store. e.g. you can pay for 3 months and not incur a setup or pay for 12 months and only pay for 10 etc.

Feel free to give us feedback here or on the forum and as usual if you have any issues don't hesitate to drop us a line on our helpdesk.

Paul, our overworked and under appreciated CTO (who also happens to be my business partner) has been beavering away on enabling more cool stuff for the VPS hosting solutions.

One of the most requested features over the past few days has been support for more linux distributions.

Since there are a LOT of linux distributions we had to focus on the more important and popular ones, so Debian was pretty much top of the list.

You can now order Debian VPS (without plesk) via the online shop.

Rest assured that we do plan on adding more linux distributions, but as the old adage goes - Rome wasn 't built in a day, so we'd have to humbly ask you to bear with us.

Of course you don't have to wait if you don't want to, but hopping up and down won't speed things up...

Speaking of linux distros ...

We probably won't be adding support for Gentoo for some time if ever - sorry!

And now to distract you with a pretty image:

Of course it's more than just pretty.

With the virtual server solution powered by Parallels you can easily manage your virtual server (with full root access) from within the control panel. Want to reboot it or even stop it? How about a simple mouse click?
And if you break your VPS beyond recognition you can easily reinstall it from scratch and start all over. (I think I've broken mine about 4 times in the last 48 hours !!)

I'll probably post some screenshots or a screencast of the system when I get a chance.

But if there's any topic you'd like to see covered do let us know via the comments