FAQs

We fully own all of our equipment which is located in the city of Manchester, England (UK).  We have our own rack cabinet space in state of the art data centres in Manchester, England (UK).  For more information about the Data Centre click here.

We connect into a sophisticated, self-healing 10Gbps Manchester fibre network, which spans six Manchester data centres. For more information about the network click here.

We use the virtualisation solution build into the Linux kernel; the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). For more information about KVM click here (external link).

We use highly reliable Intel servers with powerful Xeon processors, large amounts of RAM, and high availability features such as out of bound access, dual power supplies, and multiple gigabit ethernet ports.

Short answer:  the city of Manchester, in England. Long technical answer: Your VPS IP address(es) are directly assigned to your VPS virtual network card, connected directly to the public internet.  These IP addresses are assigned to us by the data centres where our servers (and your VPS) are located, in the city of Manchester, England, and we then assign them to your VPS.  Therefore, when your VPS communicates with other computers on the internet, they will see your VPS as being located in the city of Manchester, England.

All of the data inside your VPS is stored on a sophisticated storage platform that mirrors all your data across more than one physical host server. This means your VPS remains running uninterrupted even in the event of a complete failure of all storage on the server it is running on.  The platform uses a mixture of SSD drives, SAS drives, and battery backed hardware RAID cards.

All of your VPS data is securely stored in our data centers in and around the city of Manchester, in England. At no point does any of your data ever leave the geographical region of Manchester, England.

After you have placed an order, you’ll receive an acknowledgement email from our order system immediately. Then, within a maximum of 12 hours (but usually much sooner), you will receive another email confirming that your VPS is ready, and with full details of how to access and use it.  Please note orders placed anytime on a Sunday might not get processed until first thing on Monday morning.

You most certainly can. The nature of our virtualisation platform allows you to install your own kernel within your VPS in the same way you would install it on any physical machine.

Pygrub is a feature of the Xen virtualisation platform. As we use KVM, a different virtualisation platform, there is no Pygrub, because such a feature is not needed in order to be able to run your own kernel. You can install your own kernel in your VPS just like you would do on  any physical machine.

This will almost always be no problem and we can upgrade you to another plan instantly. In some cases upgrading might not be possible if we do not have available capacity, but this would be unusual.   An upgrade does not involve any changes to your VPS other than the fact your available storage allocation is increased, and the next time you stop & start your VPS it will boot with more RAM.

We pride ourselves on being able to offer support of the highest technical quality from your first contact with us. There is no first, second, third levels for you to battle through before you finally speak to the right person. Please note, support does not include help with system administration and day to day running of the OS inside your VPS.

Support is via our online ticketing system only. We do not currently offer telephone support, though we may do in the future.  You can raise an online ticket here.

We are a small company but aim to answer support tickets as quickly as we possibly can, sometimes within minutes, other times up to 3 or 4 hours. Tickets raised in the middle of the night UK time or on Sundays usually must wait until the following morning. But you’ll find the technical quality of our support much higher than what is typical at larger companies.

Yes we most certainly do.  Each VPS comes with an optional /64 IPv6 subnet, which is a staggering 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses! However, IPv6 is not initially enabled by default on newly provisioned VPS orders, please raise a support ticket or indicate in the order comments if you would like IPv6 to be enabled on your VPS.

You can run most operating systems that are commonly used today on the x86 platform, including all Linux and BSD variants. If you have an OS you’d like to run not in one of these categories please contact us and we’ll clarify if it is possible.

We have a wide range of Linux & BSD based operating systems, rescue systems, and disk partitioning tools available in the Control Panel as ISO files that can be easily attached to your VPS as a virtual CD/DVD drive. Click here to see the full list.

Yes, you can enable VNC access on any VPS regardless of the operating system in the Control Panel. We will be adding the ability to access the virtual serial console in your VPS in the very near future, please keep an eye out for this new feature which will be coming soon in the Control Panel.

Yes you can, please submit your request in a support ticket and it will be actioned promptly.

We consider it very important that customers are informed as soon as possible whenever a service affecting issue has arisen. Such incidents are usually posted to our blog here, along with planned maintenance notifications. However, sometimes information is just emailed directly to customers.

Yes,  just submit a support ticket asking for it. You can either provide it to us as a download on a web or FTP server or similar, or you can upload it to us.  We reserve the right to inspect the ISO contents to satisfy ourselves it is safe for our network.

Our hardware is highly reliable (see previous FAQ) but there is always the rare possibility of a catastrophic hardware failure resulting in complete loss of your data.  We do not currently take any external back ups of any of your data, so we highly recommend that you put in place your own backup arrangements.

Due to the increasing scarcity of IPv4 IP addresses, we do not currently offer the option of purchasing extra IPv4 addresses over the addresses already allocated with your VPS plan.  However, you can increase the number of IPv4 addresses allocated to your VPS  by simply upgrading your VPS plan to one that comes with a higher allocation.  With an upgrade we can assign your IP immediately without you needing to reboot straight away.

Please see the other FAQ about upgrading your VPS.

Yes, running a VPN such as OpenVPN, or a Proxy server, is fine, we have no objection to that.

Although we do accept Bitcoin as payment, unfortunately we do not permit using your VPS for digital currency mining purposes. This is not because we have anything against digital currencies.  It is simply because the constant high CPU usage required for mining incurs electricity costs for us that are far higher than what we charge you for the VPS.

Generally speaking, you can use your VPS for anything that is legal in the UK, but please see our other FAQs for some specific use cases you might be considering.  Obviously we will not tolerate your VPS being used to send spam, host malware, take part in DDoS attacks, or similar activities aimed at harming other internet users on our network or elsewhere. Please also see our Terms & Conditions of service for more information.

Manchester VPS is a trading name of sysvinit Zone Ltd.  See About Us.

¡Si! Puede enviar email o crear tickets en español, y podemos respondar en español.

Ja, sie können uns ein email senden oder ein ticket schreiben in Deutsch, und wir antworten ihnen in Deutsch zurück.