Network and hardware reach us.
The operating system is yours.
Unmanaged is the one word on this site that people read as a warning, so it is worth saying exactly where the boundary runs — and what sits on the far side of it, because something does.
- the network, routing and announcements
- your port, and anything upstream of it
- the hardware itself — hardware that fails is replaced at our cost
- the management controller, power and cooling
- provisioning, and the handover of access
This is section 8 of the terms, not a service level we invented for a web page. There is no percentage attached to it, because none was signed.
- operating-system work: installs, patching, packages
- application and database setup, tuning and migrations
- managed control panels, if you want one at all
- anything you would call sysadmin work on a retainer
Unmanaged is a boundary, not a shortage. The same group runs a managed service, and moving a question there is a normal thing to do rather than an admission of defeat.
- the operating system and everything you install on it
- your firewall rules and your keys
- your backups — we do not take any, and there is nothing to restore from
- monitoring your own application
The console reaches further than SSH does: IPMI goes down to BIOS and boot order, so a machine you have locked yourself out of is still yours to rescue.
What to put in it.
A network problem is diagnosed from evidence, and the round trip to ask for that evidence is usually longer than the fix. Four things shorten it.
- A traceroute and an MTR, both directions if you can get them — from you to the machine, and from the machine outward.
- The time window, with a timezone. “Last night” costs a round trip to establish.
- The addresses involved, not just the hostname.
- For anything hardware-shaped: what the IPMI event log says.
Invoices, renewals and account details live in the HostiServer panel rather than here — there is no second dashboard to learn, and there is not going to be one.
The five that matter.
- Something is down at three in the morning. Who do I contact?
- Us, if it is the network, the port, the hardware or the controller — those are ours and we do not charge per ticket for them. If it is your operating system or your application, the machine is yours to reach through IPMI, and HostiServer will take it as paid work if you would rather hand it over.
- Do you publish an uptime percentage or pay service credits?
- No. We have not signed an uptime figure, so publishing one would be a number without anything behind it. What we do commit to is in section 8 of the terms: the parts we operate are ours to fix, and hardware that fails is replaced at our cost.
- Do you take backups of my server?
- No. There is no snapshot, no nightly copy and nothing to restore from if a disk dies or you delete the wrong directory. That copy is yours to make, and section 9 of the terms says so rather than burying it. If you want a machine to put it on, that is what the storage builds are for.
- Can I get help with the operating system if I ask nicely?
- Not from us, and the reason is the price rather than the ability: what you pay reflects a service that stops at the port. HostiServer sells that work properly, with someone accountable for it.
- How do I reach the machine if I have locked myself out?
- IPMI, which is yours from the first hour. It reaches the console, the power state, the boot order and the BIOS — so a broken firewall rule or a bad kernel is a reinstall you can do yourself rather than a ticket you wait on.