Hosting and Hardware

The complete lab is hosted on a rented server from www.hetzner.de, featuring:

• 6x Intel i7-8700 CPU
• 128 GB RAM
• 2x 1TB NVME

The server was in an auction, where machines (sometimes containing additional extras like a few harddrives more) are constantly dropping in price, getting cheaper and cheaper every day. But watch out - you might miss to get the desired machine if you wait too long and someone else is willing to rent it at the current price.

Using their free remote KVM service, you can ask the support to attach the KVM at a time and date to your convenience. The KVM is attached to your server and you will receive the access credentials and address via email. You can use the KVM for up to three hours, after which you can either ask for extending the use or reschedule for another time slot.

The fabulous support will also place any ISO image (or similar) on a bootable USB device, so you can remotely install the operating system which you would like to have - as a Citrix-minded guy, I chose Citrix XenServer (formerly called Citrix Hypervisor, and XenServer before this again 😄). Read the next article to learn more about my reasons for this.

I have rented machines over the last years from some German hosting companies, a few European ones and some over-sea companies. There are some reasons, why I am stuck with Hetzner, the primary one is the fair price for what you get. Depending on what you rent from Hetzner, good hardware, solid security, a user friendly web GUI, full DNS control, Web FTP, Web Mail and a traffic flatrate is usually included.

I currently have one (this here) lab machine, some web servers and several domains which they host for me. You can expect great and lightning fast support, no matter if you have just a question about your invoice or trying to solve a PXE-boot problem.