Large Web Hosting Provider Switches to FreeBSD

San Jose, California - Offmyserver, a rackmount server provider, recently completed a migration of 50 servers to the FreeBSD operating system for Host Department, a large web hosting and hosting reseller company. The servers were previously running Red Hat Linux 9 and Red Hat Linux Advanced Server.

"Based on our experience with high traffic internet systems where reliability is a must, the FreeBSD operating system has proven itself many times over. FreeBSD is in use at some of the highest traffic sites on the internet and our customer needed the best throughput available," said Matt Olander, Offmyserver engineer.  "The FreeBSD operating system delivered on all of Host Department's requirements including ease of administration, reliability, and security."

The initial migration of 20 systems happened one year ago and the systems have been very stable since, said Offmyserver production manager, Austin Stewart.

"Unlike the previous operating system we had, which was getting compromised at least once a month and caused our sysadmins small to major headaches, FreeBSD is simply untouchable," said Jimmy Rianto, CEO of Host Department, LLC.

"The FreeBSD systems are able to work and combine multiple huge hard disks which sum up to many terabytes of disk space," said Rianto.

"Our free hosting servers [which run FreeBSD] never crash, while running over 520,000 websites and get millions of requests per day," said Rianto.  Host Department also hosts more than 32,000 domain names for their premium hosting services using FreeBSD.

The Offmyserver hardware used for this migration were primarily dual Xeon mirrored SCSI systems.  The backup server was one of the first 4TB+ systems using the 3ware 9500 series card in production, said Olander.

About FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a complete and advanced Unix-like operating system which can be used as a secure and high-performance workstation, network server or firewall.  FreeBSD is developed by a team of over 200 developers. Over 12,000 third-party software suites are freely available for quick installation from the FreeBSD Packages Collection. More information about FreeBSD is available on the web at http://www.FreeBSD.org/.

About Offmyserver

Offmyserver provides custom and pre-configured high-performance rackmount servers, firewalls, and appliances for internet data centers, enterprise data centers, and content delivery networks.  Based in San Jose, Calif., Offmyserver can be found on the internet at http://www.offmyserver.com/.

About Host Department

Host Department, LLC, is a low-cost website hosting and reseller company that provides various free and premium web hosting services.  They have five redundant DS-3 (capable of 45Mbps each) lines and one OC3 connection with a less than 30-percent average saturation.  Host Department provides 24-hour toll-free technical support, redundant power, and a secure network operations center.  Host Department's website is at http://www.hostdepartment.com/.