| -----Original Message----- | Subject: OpenBSD Cloud Offerings | | I was wondering if anyone had any experience with reputable cloud | providers that currently offer OpenBSD 5.2. | | I was able to find out some information based on the OpenBSD Journal | posting from Sunday, February 13, 2011 titled "OpenBSD Private Cloud | Computing". The two vendors mentioned included ARP Networks and | RootBSD.
Do you mean VPS? I didn't know that ARP offered cloud services. However, if you are interested in VPS providers, I'll start with the usual warning: OpenBSD's security is subject to the security of the VPS host, which it is generally safe to say is not as secure as an OpenBSD default install. That said, I've been happy with my results from corgitech.com. I've got a couple VPS containers with them. They have multiple available datacenters, VMWare ESXi 5.1 performs well with OpenBSD, good bandwidth, fast support response times, and their prices are great. They recently had a ecoupon for 50% of their services: "CORGI50". If it still works you are getting one hell of a deal. I've also happily used bsdvm.com, with my only complaints being that they [1] use older VMware software, and [2] default to placing their VPS containers behind virtualized NAT (but you can request bridging, if you know to ask for it). Otherwise the service is comparable to corgitech.com, with the exception that bsdvm.com only uses one datacenter - Hurricane Electric. I'd really like to recommend amerinoc.com because they have excellent plans and service, but they use Xen on Linux, which performs poorly with OpenBSD because there are no PV drivers. I tried but couldn't convince them to offer an ESXi service. If someone - with skills beyond mine - gets motivated to complete Xen PV drivers for OpenBSD I will definitely go back to hosting OpenBSD with them. All that said, if you can afford $100 per month you should look into a dedicated server rather than VPS or cloud. You'll have to search and may need to wait for a special to be offered, but reliable dedicated providers can be found at that price point. The reason I stick with VPS is two-fold: [1] I'm a poor law student, and [2] it offers me the ability to host with several providers for redundancy. At my budget an OpenBSD VPS beats Linux shared hosting in every way. Breen
