Frequently Asked Questions and Answers
What happened to your previous Mini and Classic Managed options?
They didn’t change at all, but now are renamed a bit, so the old good Mini is now just one Aegir Core, while the Classic Managed is now four Aegir Cores. They offer still the same (or better) performance with some greatly increased limits for allowed disk space, memory and CPU power. Also the price didn’t change for the new “Mini”, while the price for Classic equivalent (four cores) is a bit higher, but it doesn’t affect any existing subscriptions, only new orders.
Do you really host only Drupal sites?
Yes. We specialize in the high performance and Drupal only hosting.
Do you offer also E-mail and DNS service?
No. We focus in 100% on Drupal web-hosting service in the SaaS and PaaS mode. We recommend to use DNS management tools provided by your registrar and Google Apps for your e-mail. You can, however, purchase our optional Google Apps Setup service, since it includes also our free nameservers with enabled wildcard DNS. For your Drupal sites outgoing e-mail we provide standard sendmail/Postfix local server.
My site layout is broken because it still references already purged, aggregated css/js files!
This is a common issue with Boost or Speed Booster cache. You may want to use the AdvAgg module to avoid this in the future. See also this hint.
How can I purge the Speed Booster cache?
Now Speed Booster works like a Boost – it immediately expires the cache for any node/page as soon as it has been edited or comment added. It also automatically expires the cache for the homepage, related taxonomy pages and RSS feed at once. You no longer need to wait up to one hour for Speed Booster cache expiration. If you are on your own server with root access, you can also purge existing Speed Booster cache with this command: $ rm -f -r /var/lib/nginx/speed/*. Otherwise you need to wait until it expires, or edit any node, or add ?nocache=1 at the end on any URL to skip this cache on the fly. For more details please read here.
Where can I check servers or network status?
We require and expect excellence, so we accept only one possible status: all services are available without issues. If there is some unexpected issue affecting more than one Aegir instance in any location, we always post live updates on Twitter. Also when there is any scheduled maintenance or system upgrade, we announce it on Twitter.
Can you install complete Aegir system on my own VPS?
Yes, however in this case it is impossible to guarantee F15 performance. When you are able to manage your own server and you don’t need that high level of performance, security and scalability, simply choose Aegir On Your Server option. We can install our OS tuned Aegir Hosting system on any VPS, cloud or dedicated machine, however we prefer the most stable OS for Aegir – Debian 6.0 Squeeze.
Why there is no high performance guarantee for remote install?
The reason we can’t guarantee the same performance on other systems is: different providers are using different hardware and OS settings even for options looking similar in terms of RAM, available CPU power etc. Furthermore, if you will choose our managed 1GB RAM option (four Cores), you will be hosted on 4-8x more powerful system, with ability to scale to at least 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 4-6 CPU real cores (burstable and free for short load peaks), while when using 1GB RAM server elsewhere, you will get only 1GB RAM max, and the same for CPU power.
I need some help with my current site but I’m not ready to purchase hosted Aegir, can you help me?
Yes, you can purchase our billed hourly basic help and later decide if you prefer to use our hosted service or consider it in the future. This basic help doesn’t include troubleshooting, only basic consultation and reviewing your current setup and possible solutions.
Can you install Aegir system on my Pantheon/Mercury VPS?
Mercury has different configuration than our preferred, since we don’t use Apache and Varnish at all, and we are using Nginx with php-fpm instead. We believe it makes more sense to use Nginx + Boost on smaller servers than using Varnish to get almost the same results as with Nginx + Boost. See some benchmarks here and here. Varnish is good/better for bigger, multi-server systems. Currently there is no benefit to use Varnish enabled VPS as a base for our Aegir system configuration.
Yes, we offer limited shell in all our options since October 2010. It allows you to run almost all possible Drush commands plus useful set of standard shell commands. It supports also rsync, scp, git, svn, cvs and many others. We also offer unrestricted root shell access in our hosted Aegir Root Cores since July 2011.
I don’t know which registrar offers advanced DNS management, can you recommend one?
Yes, we recommend Gandi.net. They have everything you need when you are using our application hosting: full DNS management plus free and big 5 E-mail mailboxes.
What is your SLA guarantee and refund policy?
All setup and one-time fees are non-refundable. Also monthly fees are non-refundable. If you will pay for 3 or more months in advance and you will decide to cancel your subscription, you can do that at any time and all your unused balance will be returned to you, excluding current month. We have now a few levels of SLA guarantee to choose from. Plus, we are working hard to keep your real uptime near 100%.