Upload your own ISO images and qcow2 templates to our control panel, and immediately begin provisioning from them.
ISO images: after provisioning a VM from an ISO installation image, you can proceed with installation over VNC; a JavaScript noVNC client is available, but you can use your own desktop VNC client if desired. Once installation is completed, a single click will swap the boot order and bring your VM online. You can snapshot the resulting disk state so that additional virtual machines can be cloned, avoiding the need for further manual installation from ISO.
QCOW2 templates: you can also upload your own qcow2 images to our platform. If you have cloud-init or similar software running in the VM, SSH keys and other instance metadata can be accessed via the OpenStack metadata service.
Security groups allow you to define ingress and egress traffic restrictions on groups of virtual machines. Unlike iptables and similar firewalls that run inside your VM, security groups are enforced at the infrastructure level; this removes the possibility of accidental firewall deactivation. Security group rules can be defined based on source/destination CIDR or security group. For example, you might create one security group for your database cluster and another for your application instances; the database security group would only allow database connections from the application security group, while the application security group would only allow incoming traffic on the application port.
Volumes are detachable block storage devices that are stored on our high availability Ceph RBD cluster. Volumes can be attached to and detached from virtual machines on demand; this means that, if you store application data on a volume, you can test a new version of the application on a new virtual machine, and commit the upgrade simply by detaching the volume from the old VM and attaching it to the new VM. The root partition can also be stored on a volume so that your instance does not depend on local storage; this way, if a host node fails, your VM will be quickly rebooted on another host node via an automatic evacuation process, avoiding downtime for hardware replacement.
Tenant networks are isolated virtual networks. Virtual machines provisioned on tenant networks can acquire any IP address in the assigned private subnet, enabling more complex network architectures. Scalable load balancers can be created in tenant networks to balance requests between several VMs.
Our hosted e-mail services allow you to easily set up e-mail on your domains. Send and receive e-mail either via webmail or IMAPS/SMTPS.
You can snapshot your VM at any time to extract the current disk state. Both live snapshots and cold snapshots can be taken: live snapshots are taken while your VM is running, and the snapshot operation is performed without any downtime; cold snapshots simply copy your VM's disk while it is offline, and may be preferable in some situations.
Snapshots allow you to rollback your VM to an earlier state if an upgrade goes badly or data is erroneously deleted. You can also use snapshots to create templates from which more virtual machines can be provisioned, avoiding the need to manually setup every new instance.
Startup scripts are shell or cloud-init scripts that are executed when newly provisioned VMs boot for the first time. When creating a new VM, you can select any number of startup scripts that you have defined on your account. Use startup scripts to automatically configure VMs for your application.
Floating IP addresses enables dynamic IP address association with virtual machine instances: they can be associated with a VM, transferred between VMs, or removed back to the pool while the VMs are still running. Like volumes, you can easily attach and detach a floating IP from a VM via the control panel or the API.
Floating IPs are useful for various purposes. If you're upgrading your website, you will probably first test the changes on a new VM. If everything checks out, then you can migrate to the new VM without downtime simply by swapping the floating IP over to it. Another use case is for reducing your costs: if you want to take a break from a project and don't need the VM running for some time, you can snapshot the VM and detach its floating IP; to restore, you can simply provision a new VM from the snapshot and use the same floating IP. This way, you are only charged for the snapshot storage and IP address.
Our fault-tolerant uptime monitoring system allows you to quickly setup checks to make sure your application is running smoothly. HTTP, TCP, ICMP, and SSL service monitoring are all supported. Notifications can be sent via e-mail, a phone call, SMS, or as an HTTP request to a custom URL.
The monitoring service is free except for phone call and SMS notification charges.
Our powerful API enables you to write software to automate VM management. Libraries in various languages are available.