WordPress users can easily join them in this blackout, with the new SOPA Blackout Plugin. This plugin makes it easy to configure your site to stage a blackout, without having requiring significant reconfiguration of your website. Users attempting to view your website, would simply see an anti-SOPA message, which you can see a preview of.

                          

A VPN is great for securing your connection if you are on an untrusted network, e.g. a coffee shop or an open network and want to make sure that you information stays safe. We are offering the VPN free for the first month for all VPS.net customers! Setup is as always simple to do.

Simply goto the VPN section of your control panel. Click “Create New Account” and select the location of the VPN you want, the type you want (If not sure choose PPTP) and click “Confirm”.

If you need help installing and setting up your VPN then you can contact support@vps.net and we will be more than happy to get you going.

                          

VPS.net first to join initiative

ANN ARBOR, Mich., November 22, 2011 — CloudLinux, Inc., developers of the only commercially-supported Linux server operating system made specifically for shared hosting, today announced its Preferred Partner Program with VPS.net the first to join.

VPS.net, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with operations and data centers all over the world, is part of UK2 Group, which provides web hosting and Internet services to a million customers worldwide. With offices in London and Utah, the UK2 Group employs more than 200 staff. VPS.net provides a high-performance, optimized and scalable cloud hosting service, which includes the CloudLinux OS, which it offers to all of its customers worldwide.

As a Preferred Partner, VPS.net and CloudLinux will do joint marketing and sales while VPS.net will have special access to technical resources. Additionally, VPS.net will host CloudLinux repositories allowing for exceptionally fast and reliable updates for VPS.net customers using CloudLinux software.

“The combination of CloudLinux OS with service from VPS.net gives shared hosters ready access to deliver to their customers,” said Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO. “The enhanced security and stability offered by CloudLinux OS provides an unmatched experience for shared hosting customers and is proven on over 5,000 production servers running CloudLinux OS.”

“The opportunity to expand our relationship with CloudLinux made perfect sense for us,” said Terry Myers, chief evangelist, VPS.net. “They deliver a product that is in high demand from our customer base and offer an innovative solution addressing common problems faced in shared hosting environments.”

CloudLinux cages each user account within its own Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE), allowing system administrators to limit CPU, memory, and concurrent connections available to each tenant. LVE effectively prevents the, “bad neighbor effect,” wherein one tenant can slow or take down an entire server. By limiting abuse, shared hosters can substantially increase server density, bringing far greater efficiency to their business.

Also, CloudLinux OS includes MySQL Governor, which enables tight control over the MySQL resources available to users, and will soon release CageFS, the industry’s only virtualized file system for shared hosters. CageFS assures that user files are only available to, and viewable by, their owner. CloudLinux also offers the fastest updates in the industry, with professional support available 24/7.

About CloudLinux, Inc.

By providing expertise in the areas of hosting, kernel and open source, CloudLinux serves the specific needs of those in the web hosting industry. Founded in 2009, CloudLinux is privately funded and headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

CloudLinux has been recognized as a leader in the industry and received numerous awards. Twice, CloudLinux has been listed as a top 10 cloud provider by HostReview. Also, CloudLinux received the Editor’s Choice Award by Web Host Magazine & Buyer’s Guide.

                          

You can either email the photos to terry@vps.net or tweet us with a picture of them. Credit will be given, so include your name and your twitter handle if you’d like some free promotion!

                          

Atlanta, Georgia – Our Atlanta data center, located at 34 Peachtree Drive, makes for a great location for your VPS, if you have visitors located throughout the United States and in South America. Our Atlanta VPS Servers are great, as they’re just one hop away from the largest exchange point for South American traffic, Miami, Florida, guarantees minimal latency and limited amount of hops required for traffic to reach its destination.

Chicago, Illinois - Our Cloud in the windy city is located at the Dupont Fabros Technology data center, in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, a suburb just outside of Chicago. Dupont Fabros Technology (DFT) is a publicly traded real estate investment company, that specializes in building and operating data centers throughout the world. Chicago is one of the main internet hubs throughout the United States and world. Being located in the central United States, Chicago makes for a great location for your Cloud VPS, if you have visitors located in the United States and Canada. Additionally, due to minimal latency to New York City, forex traders have experienced a great amount of success using our Chicago location for their VPS. A Chicago VPS Server is a great place for any SMB looking to launch their online presence.

Salt Lake City, Utah - Dubbed the “new Silicon Valley” Salt Lake City is the location of our final cloud in the United States. Located at the C7 Data center in Provo, Utah, Salt Lake City offers tremendous connectivity to the West Coast United States, Australia and New Zealand, while also being able to serve visitors located throughout Asia.

London, England - Located in London, England at the UK2Group (our parent company) data center, our London location is one of tremendous pride. With connectivity to LINX, the 3rd largest peering exchange point, London makes for powerful hosting presence throughout Europe and the East Coast United States. If your site has traffic from throughout the world, London is one of the places you could pick for your VPS.

Haarlem, Netherlands (Amsterdam) – Our Amsterdam cloud is located inside the Evoswitch data center, which features connectivity to AMS-IX, the 2nd largest exchange point in the world. Amsterdam makes for a great alternative to London, still having the powerful connectivity to allow for fast access times throughout Europe and the United States. Not only is our Amsterdam data center fast, but it’s also entirely carbon neutral!

Tokyo, Japan – Our cloud in Tokyo is our newest location, and is housed at the Equinix data center in Tokyo, Japan. Our Tokyo location makes us one of the first cloud hosting providers to have a location in Asia, without any kind of additional surcharge. Tokyo allows you to create a VPS that has extremely fast access times throughout all of Asia while also adequately serving visitors from other parts of the world.

All of our data centers repeatedly undergo thorough quality checks to assure that we’re using the best data centers available. If you’re still not sure which data center is best for you, you can try out our ping and speed test tool at www.cloudtestfiles.net. Alternatively, you can contact us and we’d be glad to help.

                          

There is no registration required. You’re simply able to login to the chat athttps://uk2group1.campfirenow.com/0cef0, which will be activated 30 minutes before the session is scheduled to start.

Recovery Mode
Yesterday we quietly rolled out a new feature dubbed recovery mode. This is a great feature that’ll help limit downtime and prevent data loss. What it does it allows you to boot your VPS with a fresh OS install, on a completely separate hard drive than your primary. This allows you to run file system checks (FSCKs), without needing intervention, recover data from file system corruptions, and gives you many other administration tools previously unavailable.

This option is available to all clients on our OnApp based clouds. If you’re currently on a Radar based cloud, this feature will not be available to you immediately however we will be rolling it out in the coming months.

Educators and non-profits
We know that living in a world with higher literacy rates is better for everyone and we also know that technology plays a large part in that. VPS.NET is delighted to be able to offer educators and non-profit organizations unique tools that can be used in a wide variety of applications to help the advancement of technology in society. Whether it be allowing high school or university students to apply techniques in a hands on environment or showing them a quick and easy way to launch their site, we’re proud to be able to help.

If you’re unable to view the YouTube video, you can also view it here.

Reselling
We have some new fantastic reseller offerings which are unlike anything else on the market. Of course we give you a discount on our standard pricing but coupled with that we provide our proprietary reseller desktop from where you can manage all your customers, handle support and billing from a single login. If you would like to see what value added services we can offer to your business please drop resellers@vps.net an email and we can get you started.

                          

Highlights include:

- The fastest, most technically advanced enterprise class SAN within all of our clouds

- Full support for Windows and Linux

- Full OnApp 2.2 support will be enabled during the beta

- Its Free!

To build your own free VPS login to https://control.vps.net and select “Create a New VPS” and Select “Beta Nodes”

Fill out the name you want to use for the server and any backup options you would like to use. Make sure that your select the Tokyo clouds as this is the only place the free/beta nodes will work.

Now select create and wait for your fresh VPS to be delivered We are very interested to hear what people think about this new cloud. Please send any feedback to mgmt@vps.net. We will also be testing the new infrastructure and its failover setup during this period so please be aware of this. It is BETA, comes with no warranty, might cause your dog to fly or your trousers to fall down in a comedic fashion. We do not recommend this for production purposes until the end of the beta.

                          

Affiliate Program
Our affiliate program pays out a whopping $85 per referral. This program can be implemented in any fashion you want – whether it be through the utilization of a text link through a review of VPS.NET or banners advertised on your site, we’ll make sure you get paid your referral commissions. To get started with our affiliate program you can simply sign up inside of the VPS.NET control panel under the “affiliates section.” If you’d like to advertise all of the UK2Group brands, you can use our affiliate manager, Aff.biz. If you choose to use banners to advertise VPS.NET’s services, we do have some already created for your use. Just as a note, it is NOT necessary to be a VPS.NET customer to be an affiliate of ours (though we’d definitely appreciate if you were).

Reseller Program
Our reseller program is one we’ve worked to make extremely competitive, and easy to setup. As a VPS.NET reseller, you’re able to resell all of our services, including the CDN. There are no setup fees or up front bulk commitment costs. Instead, you only pay for the services that you’ve already sold. Best of all, we’ve worked with Blesta, CannyBill, HostBill and WHMCS to create modules that uses our API to completely automate the sale and management of our VPS services. This allows you setup the nodes automatically for your customers, and also give them a control panel to manage their VPS; they’ll essentially have all the power of a direct VPS.NET customer.

We tend to work very close with our resellers, so there’s no automated signup form to get started. Instead, you can email me at resellers(at)vps.net and our team will walk you through the initial steps of launching your new product.

                          

Of course not. I was using various free web hosting providers – Spree, Tripod, Angelfire, Dencity… etc. You name a free web hosting provider, and I probably used them. Occasionally I did well, and made a site that was worth something, and was able to sell it to someone else for a few days worth of lunch money. Sometimes I turned around and bought a new site that interested me. Regardless, one of the first things I learned was that your hosting provider may be the very single most important part of your website (besides the topic of course). Features, flexibility, and reliability are all three that were important to me back then, and are still the most commonly asked questions we get in the pre-sales queue at VPS.NET.

A Cloud VPS from VPS.NET is able to accomplish all these, while also having several other value addons, like the scalable technology, which when combined with the high availability aspect of the cloud, is something every site could certainly benefit from.

Features
The ease of performing certain tasks ranks high for a lot of users. Having to deal with a hassle is never fun; we’ve attempt to bring in a number of outside features that’ll add a tremendous amount of value for our clients. We offer free billing programs in Blesta and HostBill, free CodeBase accounts and free SSL certificates. Along with that, you can purchase Server Density licenses, a number of control panel licenses (cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk), along with cool tools like CloudLinux and KSplice.

Flexibility
With any VPS, you have the flexibility of a dedicated server, being able to install any services or features that you need. You’re able to run your Cloud VPS as necessary for your site. Not only can you install the necessary services, but unlike a dedicated server, you have the flexibility to pay for only the resources you need. With the ability to scale your resources up and down on demand, you can give your site as many resources as it needs at the time. This will not only save you money, but also, if your site ends up receiving a significant amount of traffic, avoid a lot of downtime.

Reliability
Our Cloud VPS product is built from the ground up for reliability. The way we’re able to offer this is through the auto-healing aspect the cloud is able to offer. If at any time the server hosting your VPS experiences a problem, it is migrated over to a new server. This benefits you in comparison to a dedicated server, as you would wait for the server to at least be rebooted, if you’re lucky don’t have to wait for a hardware replacement . We also utilize redundant SANs (storage area network), which means your data is stored across multiple storage arrays. If one of the SANs experiences a problem, the other SAN will take over the work, and your website will carry on with no problem.

                          

Creating a New VPS with CloudLinux & KSplice
To get started we’re going to go to the new VPS page of the VPS.NET control panel. From there we’ll choose how many nodes we’re going to use for this Cloud VPS. In my example, I’m going to choose 4 nodes, located in our Atlanta datacenter. I’ve also chose to use Snapshot and Rsync backups, along with cPanel, RVSkins, Softaculous and LiteSpeed. They’re not necessary for CloudLinux or KSplice, however I certainly recommend them as they add considerable value to the hosting experience.

Once you click the create button, you’re all good to go with CloudLinux. We still have a few steps to go in order to get KSplice, which allows for rebootless updates, installed.

Installing KSplice
Before we can install KSplice, we first have to license it inside of the VPS.NET control panel. KSplice is totally free, so there’s really no reason not to use it. To license it, simply go to the KSplice section of the VPS.NET control panel. From there, click on the Add KSplice license and then follow the steps as outlined on the KSplice page.

Once that is complete, you’ve successfully setup your first CloudLinux VPS with KSplice. Next up we’ll show you how to upgrade an existing VPS to CloudLinux!