OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD-based web & mail hosting

Contributed by jose on from the hosting-services dept.

Jeff E writes : "I see that (Canadian) csoft.net has OpenBSD as their default OS. :) Any experiences with them or other companies for hosting a small website and associated email?

-Jeff "

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    I tried them for a while, until they axed my account with out any reason - at least they stopped charging me as well.

    Do some searching on the net. Overall, the tools they give you is awesome. But there are plenty of people out there who've had bad experiences.

    Read: http://www.plexos.com/Avoid_CSOFT.NET_Victim2.htm

  2. Comments

    1. By Alex () on

      Wow, I didn't know you're an OpenBSD user!

      Comments

      1. By Randal L. Schwartz () merlyn@stonehenge.com on http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/

        Uh, yes. I like to be able to sleep at night. When I was co-lo'ed at a Linux hosting service, we got rootkit'ed. I won't ever have that happen again, so I bailed from there and immediately started searching for an OpenBSD shop. And here I am!

  3. By Okan Demirmen () okan@demirmen.com on mailto:okan@demirmen.com

    http://www.openbsd.org/users.html has a list of a few of them too. www.jtan.com uses OpenBSD throughout their network too - you can choose from a couple of different OpenBSD shell boxes.

  4. By Jeff E () on

    They run an all-OpenBSD hosting service, and a coworker has tried them and likes them. They seem to be a nicely low-expense alternative for the knowledgeable user.

    You can register a domain name at their site and pay for that with a credit card, but can't do the payments for the ISP service itself the same way. That has to be taken care of with Paypal, check, or C2IT.

    Comments

  5. By robin () robin@cliq.org on http://www.cliq.com

    CLIQ Services , the small Oakland-based ISP I work for, runs 100% on OpenBSD servers and they've been very good to us. We're also 100% worker-owned.

  6. By pires () pires@netual.pt on mailto:pires@netual.pt

    i've been running firewalls, web servers and mail server over openbsd since it's 3.1 release (aprox. 1 and a half year) and it had never let me down :)

  7. By Alexander Payne () al3x@al3x.net on http://www.al3x.net/

    Root Route is another OpenBSD hosting shop. I've been with them for nearly a year now and they've been solid, if not overwhelmingly good. Control panel support is basically just mailto forms, nothing automated, but they are responsive. Broken English from the support staff on occasion, but you can't beat it for the price and selection of installed languages and modules. Users are nicely managed but private in an "apartment" home directory scheme, systems seem to be secure.

    Comments

    1. By Shane () on

      I just had a quick look at Root Route.

      Are all their data centres located in the Hong Kong region?

      Or should I say, the data centres they are using. Since those pics look way too good for the prices they're asking.

      Reminded me of my old Telco/Stock Exchange days.

      I'm currently very happy with www.bizintegrators.com. Root Route seems too good to be true?

    2. By Boris () support+boris@rootr.net on http://rootr.net/

      Indeed the data center pictured at rootr.net site is in H.K. It is owned by a local real estate (Sunevision), it is ISO9001 certified, with all the goodies it claims to have. This same building is also used by banking recovery centers, and by trans-pacific tier-1 optical carriers like Reach and Global crossing, which are also rootr.net's main uplinks.

      rootr.net uses openbsd since launch (was 2.6 I think) nearly everywhere. most of the customers are programmers, which is why the servers have all those standard and non-standard modules. We also provide mass/bulk DNS for other providers... And when business permits, the extras goes either to east asian charities, or openbsd HQ.

      If the USA re-stabilize, we may re-open services there at the end of the year. If not, possibly Canada ou France ou la Suisse, where we're looking for partnerships with similar openbsd orientations (consider this a call).

      Boris

      And yep, I'm the same boris that sponsored deadly.org a few years ago with colocation at the Mae-west. In that other life I was the supervisor of a data center for another good ISP; and also took care of routing and dns for a Telecom IX in San Jose. I settled in Hong Kong, a 100% geek city island, happy here working for rootr.net in engineering.

      The curious monkeys and elephants now knows.
      Monkey eats peanuts, elephant eats peanut shells, and since there are many well-fed elephants, there must be really a lot of monkeys.

      Kung-He-Fat-Choy. Cho-yat is today.

  8. By Marco Peereboom () marco@peereboom.us on http://www.peereboom.us & http://www.wiredreflexes

    I host 2 websites + email on OpenBSD.
    My webserver runs on i386 (PHP, Apache, webmail etc)
    My mailserver runs on sparc64 (postfix+sasl2+imaps).

    The firewall in front of it runs OpenBSD on sparc64. Both boxes are in a DMZ.

    I basically never touch any of these boxes (minus checking logs for attempted breakins); the boxes just sit there being pretty.

    See:
    http://www.peereboom.us
    http://www.wiredreflexes.com

  9. By Cr0niC () on

    I work for a small business and we use OBSD for firewalling, web hosting, and email. It works quite well, and we have been very successful with what we are doing. Props to all who do so well every day to make OBSD the best there is!

  10. By kremlyn () on

    I've been running OpenBSD exclusively on my web, email, file, dns and syslog servers since 2.9. It has never ONCE let me down, but these days I'm trying to expand my knowledge of other Open Source OS's - particularly ones that seem to be used/accepted in industry a lot more down here in Australia. As such, I'm toying with Debian and FreeBSD.

    Still love OpenBSD though.. keep up the good work.

  11. By mirabile () mirabile@bsdcow.net on http://mirbsd.de/

    Don't forget that service of Joshua Steele's,
    http://www.codefusionis.com/ is the starting
    point where to look.
    The bonus point: from the reward (eg, traffic
    which is paid for but not used) he has enough
    of a margin to host BSD projects such as
    open.bsdcows.net on that box.

    Comments

    1. By Josh () selerius@codefusion.org on http://codefusion.org

      Actually, all the hosting we provide now is to fund *bsd related projects (specically openbsd), so no profit is gained from hosting...if we make money, we just buy more hard drives/memory/etc. for everyone who is getting service to use.

      www.codefusionis.com/index.php?page=oss has more information.

  12. By Fredric Jones () on

    Hello...

    I like the qmail + vpopmail + qmailadmin etc setup, but its not going to work in a chroot.

    Does anyone know of a setup which;

    Allows 'postmasters' of a domain to easily alter virtual pop3 accounts for their domain ( like qmailadmin ), while at the same time running in chroot and with a minumum of bloat?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      You should be aware of qmail list seems agree of
      vpopmail be not recommended.
      Look at vmailmgr.org

  13. By Alex () on

    In Germany that probably would be http://www.bsws.de by Henning

  14. By Glenn Bailey () gbailey@sprocketdata.com on http://www.sprocketnetworks.com

    I am the head admin for Sprocket Data, the company Randal refered to above ;-) And ya, I have converted all of our major single processor systems to OpenBSD. We do custom OpenBSD installs, and prefer that our clients use OpenBSD!

    Comments

  15. By Rubén () ruben@accedo.es on www.accedo.es

    I'm the owner of a spanish company called Accedo working with OpenBSD now along two years.

    We have two servers, one for mail and the other for running web aplications (developed by us) and now I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't change the stability and security warranties of OpenBSD for any other solution (comercial or not).
    Greetings, Rubén

  16. By Morsello () on

    I have used csoft's hosting plans for 3 years now.

    I only had some problems with their email policies, that are too much "closed" for real world Internet, requiring to have some email aliases on other servers with relaxed policies.

  17. By Anonymous Coward () none@nowhere.com on mailto:none@nowhere.com

    Calyx has been around since 1995 - has office in NYC and Amsterdam and its own network

  18. By Adam L. () hostmaster-munge@bitpunk.com on bitpunk.com

    I run a small hosting provider on three obsd machines, 100+ domains or so, in a colo cage. we're surrounded by linux boxes that are rooted on a regular basis, almost weekly. I suspect this is mostly due to Linux's larger market share, but hey. The linux guys I know rag on me pretty good, but I just tell just them I'm lazy and don't want to do all the extra work they have to do.

    :)

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (69.230.9.42) on

      dude- get in touch if you are out there

      yasha

  19. By Allan () contact@echoraith.net on http://www.echoraith.net/

    I too run a small web hosting business . All our servers run OpenBSD, and have done since we started up.

    I've always been very pleased with OpenBSD's stability, especially after the time the root disk failed on one of our more important servers. It kept serving http, albeit with a small delay :)

  20. By Ozguer (85.107.95.240) on

    http://www.bizintegrators.com is just great! They have very stable servers....pleased to know them! A great support also!!

  21. By Ozguer (85.107.95.240) on

    Bizintegrators is just great! They have very stable servers....pleased to know them! A great support also!!

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