Virtual Private Server Solutions from Verio

Verio, a subsidiary of NTT Communications, this week announced the launch of its NTT/VERIO Virtual Private Server Version 2 (VPS v2). The new offering, launched under the Small to Medium Enterprise Hosting unit’s family of products, offers smaller businesses a unique combination of technology and performance in a virtual private server (VPS) hosting solution.

VPS is an innovative hosting environment that gives customers their own UNIX-based virtual machine. Each VPS is a private and protected area that operates as an independent server. The VPS allows multiple customers to share the expense of hardware and network connections, without sacrificing performance.

Even though hardware is shared, the NTT/VERIO VPS v2 technology features ‘fair share’ systems management, so each VPS customer receives guaranteed resources for security and performance. Verio’s enhanced partitioning technology delivers assured resources, regardless of the activities of other businesses sharing the box.

Dave Harding, Verio director of SME product management, said fair share technology means that small businesses are guaranteed allocation of server space, processing power, and memory.

“We made a fundamental change to the UNIX kernal, which allows for better ability to manage and control the box,” Harding said. “We police the settings to make sure a resource-intensive application for one business doesn’t take away from another business using the same server.

Harding also said this method of partitioning also provides a solid defense against security breaches.

“By using UNIX partitioning we’ve reduced the vulnerability of the system overall,” Harding said.

The improved partitioning also means that customers can have root access to a shared server without messing up someone else’s programs. Harding said this is a key feature because prior to VPS v2, administrators only had “virtual access” to the root.

“For years we provided a special tool to provide virtual root access to our shared servers,” Harding said. “But UNIX administrators found it cumbersome to use. With VPS v2 we allow true root access so administrators can install applications and access their account directly.”

This means that small business customers get a dedicated hosting environment, but at a fraction of the cost. These root access features allow users to control all VPS resources including access to file systems, configuration files, system libraries, root files and application installations.

Harding said that the company likes to think of itself as the people who introduced VPS six years ago.

“We’ve made various improvements and enhancements over time but VPS v2 is a significant upgrade,” Harding said.

The NTT/VERIO advanced VPS solution is built on an open architecture platform. This gives reseller partners and end users more flexibility than other VPS offerings and improves compatibility and integration capabilities with other systems. Based on the industry-standard UNIX platform and with the ability to run Free BSD and many Linux applications in emulation mode, the VPS v2 enables increased use of off-the-shelf applications. This VPS v2 environment enables companies to build and deploy an array of applications, including e-commerce, multimedia solutions and database applications.

This flexibility, coupled with Verio’s experience in providing managed services, makes VPS v2 attractive to small businesses that need a more powerful and economical computing solutions, but may not have the internal resources to manage it themselves. With the offering, the VPS v2 can serve a range of businesses’ needs such as supporting an intranet, custom application development and hosting, Web-based calendaring, e-mail management and data management, among other possibilities.

In early offerings to partners, more than 600 SME reseller accounts have been activated with the new VPS v2 offering. Mark Sharkey, founder of Precision Pros, a Verio SME reseller partner, said the security and flexibility of VPS v2 is important to its small business customers.

“As our customers outgrow their current Web infrastructures, they need the kind of Virtual Private Server solution that Verio now offers with VPS v2. The combination of root access and the fair share server resource allocation gives our customers a more complete VPS solution,” Sharkey said.

Pricing and Availability
The new NTT/VERIO VPS v2 is available immediately through both the reseller and direct channels. Three product plans are offered: VPS v2 Standard, Pro and Pro Plus, with a retail price starts at $149.95 a month; a one-time setup fee may apply. The Standard version provides 1.25 GB of disk space, while the Pro provides 2.5 GB and Pro Plus provides 5.0 GB. All three options have no additional charges for data transfers. User accounts and mailboxes are unlimited. Add-on services, such as additional disk space, domain naming and merchant modules vary.

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