Hardware
Our infrastructure is based on servers using AMD Opteron processors from multiple hardware vendors. The average server buildout for Opteron machines is:
- 2 AMD Opteron 2216 HE dual-core processors
- 8-16 GB of RAM
Servers in Chicago
RapidXen's servers in Chicago are hosted in the Chicago Steadfast facility.
Our servers in Chicago have multi gigabit connectivity from 2 seperate bandwidth providers, Steadfast Networks and Hurricane Electric, Hurricane Electric is 1 AS hop away from every peer available in Equinix.
Servers in Los Angeles
RapidXen's servers in Los Angeles are hosted in the QuadraNet 530 W 6th facility. QuadraNet is 1 AS hop away from every peer available at Equinix and other peering exchanges in the Los Angeles area.
Xen
Our servers run Xen, which is used for virtualizing a server into multiple VPSes. Unlike some other virtualization solutions, VPSes running under Xen have near realtime performance. In conjunction with some other tools, we can easily provision many different kinds of VPSes with different kinds of operating systems, ranging everywhere from Debian to OpenSolaris.
You can read more about Xen at Wikipedia.
But it's virtualization... surely it's slow!
Xen's advanced scheduling offerings in conjunction with monitoring ensure that your VPS will get a fair share of CPU time, no matter what. At the same time however, it allows your VPS to take advantage of free CPU time that isn't being used by other VPSes. Additional scheduling credit can be bought in the form of virtual CPUs, which means that you are guaranteed time on more than one CPU at a time.
Available Operating Systems
We can instantly provision service for any of the following operating systems:
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- CentOS
- Arch Linux
- OpenSUSE
- Gentoo
The following operating systems are also available, but we do not recommend using them with Xen due to bugs or being easy to mess up in Xen, the following also require manual provisioning and may take up to 5 business days:
- Slackware
- FreeBSD
- NetBSD (experimental)
- Solaris (user provides own images)
Don't see the operating system you want?
You're probably not out of luck: other operating systems are available as long as they run under Xen 3.2, please note what you want on your order. Also, if you have a specific distribution image you want to run, just provide a place for us to download it to our servers, and we'll provision your VPS using that. Make sure that image is an ext3 filesystem though, some filesystems have been problematic with regards to resizing.