Mammoth VPS News

We've recently introduced a new system to block certain outbound network connections from newly-created VPSs.

By blocking the outgoing connections used for email, SSH and Remote Desktop you can prevent your VPS from being used for spam or brute-force attacks, which are both illegal and significant data transfers. Many customers who contact us about unexpectedly high data transfer on their VPS discover that their VPS has been hacked.

We hope this move will improve the security of the platform as a whole.

Approved customers can control this setting by logging in to mPanel and selecting 'Port Blocking' from the 'Manage' menu for their selected VPS. We encourage customers who don't explicitly need these services to leave them blocked to add another layer of security to their VPS.

Please note that the existing VPSs of current customers will not be affected by this change - but any new VPS created (even if you are an existing customer) will have this port blocking enabled by default.

If you are having problems or would like more information on this feature please feel free to contact support!

With a new year comes new plans! We've been revising our VPS plan offerings for 2012 and these new plans have just gone live.

There are two main changes for this refresh - the first is that all Linux plans (except Personal and Basic) have dropped in price. The second is that all plans have had a generous bandwidth increase. The details of the increases are outlined in the table below:

Another minor change is that we've rebalanced the virtual CPU allocation in each of these plans. After looking into how the majority of customers used CPU on the services, we decided that this change (in conjunction with the new bandwidth offerings) would offer the best value for customers, while ensuring customers who need more CPU are able to get it.

Existing customers may switch to a 2012 plan via the 'Change Plan' menu item within mPanel.

A new version of Ubuntu landed last week, bringing the popular Linux distribution up to version 11.10.

We're happy to announce that we now have it available for customers to install on their VPS!

If you're interested in trying it out you can simply hit the 'Change' link on the Manage page for your VPS and select it from the operating system list.

We've just rolled out a new update to the Mammoth VPS site with some minor tweaks and a couple of cool new features. Here's a quick list of the main changes:

• Statistics improvements! We've made some back-end changes to the statistics collection which will result in more accurate data being made available to everyone. This will help users better understand how their system is performing and also give us a better insight into the overall performance of the system.
• mPanel Memory Graph - as part of the improvements to our statistics, we have a new (optional) service for customers who want to know more about their VPS memory usage. It requires the installation of some extra software - check out our Knowledge Base article for more information.
• Show VNC during reinstall - so you can more accurately track the progress of an operating system reinstall, the process now opens a VNC session to your VPS so you can watch it in real time.
• Hostname improvements - you can now change your VPS hostname in mPanel. Additionally, using the cloning feature now allows you to reuse existing hostnames.
• Exit surveys - when customers cancel, they're now prompted to (optionally) provide some information about why they're leaving us. We hope to use this information to improve the service across the board!
• General website improvements, including some extra sanity checking on sign-up to make sure new customers don't run into any problems.

CentOS v6.0 has been released! The latest version of this popular Linux distribution features a lot of changes; if you're interested you can check out the official release notes for all the details.

We've created images for CentOS v6.0 and it is available now in both 32 and 64-bit varieties for all Mammoth VPS plans.

Due to popular demand from the forex/currency trading section, we now have some new features specifically to make life easier for users signing up on Mammoth VPS to use it with the popular free trading software MetaTrader 4.

Users can now sign up on plans with pre-installed software configured to work with their broker of choice from the variety that we support (at the time of writing we're currently supporting AxiTrader, Go Markets, Pepperstone, and Vantage FX).

Additionally, your VPS will be configured so that if your VPS is rebooted or you accidentally log out, MetaTrader 4 will automatically start up again - ensuring that you will be online as much as possible.

The Mammoth VPS network typically offers lower latency to broker networks, meaning your trades will generally occur faster. You can connect to your VPS anywhere you have Internet access from anywhere around the world, and you don't need to worry about leaving your home computer on all the time just to make sure you're trading.

Find out more on our MetaTrader 4 landing page!

Based on requests from several customers, we've just rolled out a new operating system image for Windows Server 2003. Users can now sign up and use this older edition of the Windows Server operating system or switch their existing OS.

The image is Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition R2; it has Service Pack 2 pre-installed. It is currently only available in a 32-bit version.

Thanks to those customers for their feedback and their patience while we got this online!

Our new server is now online - a little later than expected - and we're once again accepting new customers.

Existing customers that were looking to upgrade but we're stuck waiting for the new server are now also able to upgrade; if you can't immediately change your plan via mPanel please contact support so we can assist you.

We apologise for the delay in making this happen! We were - so we thought - well prepared for the release of this new server; it had been happily sitting in the rack and had passed all our usual tests. However, as soon as we started moving it into production, we noticed some major stability problems when moving VPS guests back and forth.

After double checking the hardware again we were able to rule most of that out, and then started looking more closely at the exact nature of the fault. In the end, it turned out to be a low-level problem with how we zeroed the disks before VPS installation - something would trip up resulting in a kernel panic.

Fortunately the resolution for this was relatively simple - just a minor change to how the disk zeroing process is handled. For those interested in the gory details, we changed:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=5k of=/dev/storage/customer_disk

to:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=5k of=/dev/storage/customer_disk oflag=direct

So if you're seeing weird crashes or kernel panics when trying to zero disks... this could be why!

We've recently finished adding support for the Finnix Recovery CD as an option for users that need some advanced functionality for their VPS. This will allow users to repair disks, reset the root password, and change file system types.

Full instructions are available in our Finnix Recovery CD article in the Knowledge Base.