How do they do their VPS product? [was Re: FreeBSD based web hosting?]

[Maxim Khitrov]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 12:29 PM, George Hartzell <hartzell at alerce.com> wrote:
> Sahil Tandon writes:
>  > Maxim Khitrov <mkhitrov at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >
>  > > I'm currently with JohnCompanies. Overall, it's been a positive
>  > > experience, though I wish they offered FreeBSD 7. Beta testing for it
>  > > was supposed to begin last month, but so far no news.
>  >
>  > +1 for JC.  The tech support and availability is unparalleled.  Satisfied
>  > customer for over three years.
>
> Seeing JC advertise a FreeBSD VPS product reminded me of an itch I've
> never been able to scratch.
>
> I know about jails at the simple end, and I know about VMware at the
> complicated end, but I've never been able to figure out what technology
> underlies the VPS offerings.
>

I'm not sure about FreeBSD 4.x, but with the more recent versions, the
solutions I've seen were using jails, Xen, or VMWare. I tried running
FreeBSD using Parallels a while back and didn't get very far.

JC is using Jails. An easy way to tell is if you run 'ifconfig' and
don't see the loopback address (127.0.0.1). This is a restriction of
the jails system. Another hint is if you run 'mount' and see that the
device mounted as / doesn't exist in /dev. The main disadvantage of
jails is that you cannot mess with the kernel, but otherwise I think
it's actually a better solution, in my opinion. Less resources are
wasted with jails than with a full VM. A Xen or VMWare server will
behave exactly the same as a physical machine.

- Max