This winter we are going to expand our upstreams with an additional, high-quality carrier.

In addition to the already existing, extremely reliable connections via M-Net and Telia Sonera (10 Gbit/s each) there will be yet a third 10 Gbit/s connection in our datacenter available from February 2012 on. With it we're investing in a new level of redundancy for our datacenter customers. In the most unlikely event that a fibercable is going to be damaged by a excarvator or somehow else, our clients would not even notice any constraints. The two other glassfiber connections would be taking over, as in such case our high end CISCO-equipment would route the traffic automatically and without interruptions of service.

The new carrier Level 3 is widely known for his quality. Being a TIER1-carrier just like Telia Sonera it features a total of around 100 000 fiber miles worldwide. Thus, Level 3 is considered as the biggest and best-linked carrier in the world. Besides the excellent European network of Level 3 it's especially the American continent which is connected very well by the U.S. company. This makes Level 3 to the ideal choice for us, because we already have Telia Sonera as upstream carrier which is connected to 90% of all european broadbandnetworks directly. Level 3 serves 18 of world's top 20 telecom carriers.

For our customers that means - besides the formerly mentioned redundancy - that they benefit from an even broader internet bandwidth, a remarkably improved worldwide routing by using three parallel upstreams and last but definitely not least, a much better price in regards to traffic.

Further, we will offer more upstreams and peerings in the near future.

--------- The same text in german / Der gleiche Text auf deutsch: ---------

Noch in diesem Winter werden wir unsere Upstreams um einen weiteren, qualitativ hochwertigen Carrier erweitern.

Voraussichtlich im Februar wird neben den beiden bereits vorhandenen, äußerst zuverlässigen Anbindungen via M-Net und Telia Sonera (jeweils 10 Gbit/s) eine weitere 10 Gbit/s-Anbindung im Rechenzentrum verfügbar sein. Damit investieren wir in ein drittes Redundanzlevel für unsere Rechenzentrumskunden. Sollte beispielsweise der seltene Fall auftreten, dass eine Glasfaserleitung durch einen Bagger oder anderweitig beschädigt wird, spüren unsere Kunden hiervon nichts: Die Internetanbindung wird durch nunmehr gleich zwei weitere Glasfasern aufrecht erhalten. Unser hochwertiges CISCO-Equipment routet in einem solchen Fall automatisch und ausfallfrei den Traffic um.

Der neue Carrier Level 3 steht weltweit für höchste Qualität. Genau wie Telia Sonera ist als er als TIER1-Carrier "upstreamfrei" und verfügt über rund 160.000 Kilometer eigene Glasfaserkabel weltweit. Damit ist Level 3 wohl der größte und am Besten vernetzte Carrier weltweit. Neben einem exzellenten europäischen Netz ist insbesondere der gesamte amerikanische Kontinent von dem US-Unternehmen bestens konnektiert. Damit stellt Level 3 für Giga-Hosting.biz eine hervorragende Ergänzung zu dem bereits bestehenden Carrier Telia Sonera dar, an den über 90 % aller europäischen Bandbreitennetze direkt angeschlossen sind. Level 3 versorgt 18 der TOP 20 Telefongesellschaften auf der Welt.

Für unsere Kunden bedeutet dies - neben der bereits eingangs erwähnten Redundanz - noch mehr zur Verfügung stehende Internetbandbreite, ein noch besseres, weltweites Routing durch den parallelen Einsatz der Upstreams von M-Net, Telia Sonera und Level 3 sowie letztlich einen noch besseren Trafficpreis.

Darüber hinaus werden in Kürze weitere Upstreams und Peerings folgen.

An era is just about to draw to a close. The GIGA Dedicated Server XL, which has been a successfull contributor to our server fleet for years, will vanish from our portfolio shortly.

This XL rootserver will only remain available for ordering from our homepage for a short while. You have got just a few more days left to grab a hold of this server at a monthly rate of 44.99 EUR. Giga-International will not offer any root server afterwards at such a low monthly rental fee.

For many many years, actually for almost a decade, the Dedicated Server XL played a vital role in Giga International's story of success. Almost nearly 7 years ago, back in January 2005, it entered it's high end position within our server portfolio, being the most powerful server then. And considering the time span of 7 years - in terms of hardware developements  an incredible long time - it was never eliminated from our portfolio.

Given the technical circumstances back then, this server was equipped with sensational 2GB RAM, an Intel Pentium IV 3,0 Ghz processor and hyperthreading technology, as well as a 250GB harddisk. It's hardware never changed and the server operates frontline, until nowadays. Like a true gentleman, it never changed it's style and elegance.

The dedicated server XL was built and configured by Giga International for their customers ever since in a number of several hundred machines.During the following years we introduced the DUAL-Core and even QUAD-Core servers with a multitude of RAM and harddisk capacity.

But, it took well over 4 years, until in Spring 2009 a new dedicated server model, the Core i7, ruled out the model XL for being the most popular server ever rented (Nonetheless, this record could not be kept for such a long time,  since it was broken by it's successor, the even more popular Dedicated Server 6-Core).

What makes this dedicated root server, which requires  - unlike to the virtual servers - to be individually built for each customer and connected in our datacenter, so special and so unique that it was kept on the hosters product portfolio for 7 years, and is still remains to be contineously requested and ordered on a daily basis by our clients?

One of the reasons might be it's Intel Processor with hyperthreading, which features a technology that was ground breaking back then, but which also still satisfies the demands of most applications using it for a 'Dual Core' substitute. Or maybe it is the fact, that it's random access memory with 2GB still suffices for each LINUX distribution and even supports the latest resource consuming WINDOWS operating systems.

Or pretty simple, it might be the incredible low price, due to the depreciation of hardware costs, of 44.99 EUR per month for a self operated server, including electric power, air condition and unlimited traffic which makes it so attractive.

However, maybe it is the charm of this little root server legend, which was placed into service shortly after the foundation of Giga International and which has ever since supported the raise and expansion of Giga International. Likewise any customer who enjoyed ordering and using one of these appliances until today.

Retain one of these budget servers and experience yourself the incredible performance our 'oldie' is still able to proof. Reserve this little symbol of 'nostalgia' during the last remaining days of it's tenure, because once vanished from our portfolio, it will not ever return.

And just like the old saying goes: Legends may sleep - but they never die.

While super models are presently strolling down the catwalks in TV-shows true beauties can still be discovered at our company.

Giga-International.com had not been afraid of any expenses and efforts to present their top notch virtual servers „L“ and „XL“ even more attractive on the virtual catwalk, starting today. So we have silently boosted the hardware of our hostsystems during the past couple of weeks to present you here and now with an upgrade which does all honour to haute couture in Milan and Paris.

Giga-International presents: The GIGA virtual servers in a new outfit!

• V-Server M
• CPU: One core, single priority
• RAM: 2 GB guaranteed
• HDD: 100 GB
• Uplink: 100 Mbit/s
• Unlimited Traffic
• Only 9,99 EUR / month
• Minimum contract period 1 month

• V-Server L
• CPU: Two cores, double priority
• RAM: 6 GB guaranteed
• HDD: 300 GB
• Uplink: 100 Mbit/s
• Unlimited Traffic
• Only 19,99 EUR / month
• Minimum contract period 1 month

• V-Server XL
• CPU: Four cores, quadruple priority
• RAM: 12 GB guaranteed
• HDD: 600 GB
• Uplink: 100 Mbit/s
• Unlimited Traffic
• Only 39,99 EUR / month
• Minimum contract period 1 month

One of our customers has created a gift for us. He created a really nice website including a flash movie about us:

http://giga-international-lovers.com

He presented it to us with the words "And I'm Proud To Be One Of Giga-International Customers".

You can imagine how happy we are having received this amazing animation. Thank you so much!!

This gift is definetly an appeal for us to keep up our efforts in order to provide really good services and products to all of our customers.

As of today, Giga-International reduces the price for the PARALLELS-Plesk administration panel. New prices apply for Linux- and Windows software likewise:

Plesk for Dedicated Servers:

• Plesk 10 Domains: 9,99 EUR / month
• Plesk 100 Domains: 19,99 EUR / month
• Plesk Unlimited Domains: 29,99 EUR / Monat

Plesk for VServers:

• Plesk Unlimited Domains: 9,99 EUR / month

In particular you will enjoy these new conditions by renting a virtual server. So far we charged for the 'unlimited' domains license the same amount as we did for dedicated servers, 39.99 EUR so to speak. The new price is only 25% of that amount.

------------------- Der gleiche Text auf deutsch / the same text in german: -------------------

Ab heute senkt Giga-Hosting.biz den Preis für das Administrations-Panel Parallels Plesk. Die neuen Preise gelten sowohl für die Linux- als auch für die Windows-Variante der Software:

Plesk für Dedicated Server:

• Plesk 10 Domains: 9,99 EUR / Monat
• Plesk 100 Domains: 19,99 EUR / Monat
• Plesk Unlimited Domains: 29,99 EUR / Monat

Plesk für VServer:

• Plesk Unlimited Domains: 9,99 EUR / Monat

Insbesondere bei Bestellung eines VServers profitieren Sie von den neuen Konditionen: Hier kostete die Lizenz für unlimitiert viele Domains bislang das gleiche wie für Dedicated Server, also 39,99 EUR / Monat. Der neue Preis beträgt nur noch 1/4 davon!

Order now: http://www.giga-international.com/?show=vserver

Just right after the official completion of MICROSOFT's new operating system for server applications - entitled Windows Server 2012 - our technicians have started with working on its evaluation. We have performed numerous functionality tests for our customers and in particular the integration of this new system into our "ASI" (Automatic System Installer) System. We take pride in reporting today:

Windows Server 2012 is now available as an 'upgrade' for all our rootservers and virtual servers alike.

New customers can order Windows Server 2012 directly during the ordering process on our homepage while existing clients simply need to send an email.

Microsoft took the opportunity, given by the launch of this new operating system, to substantially simplify their licensing model and versions offered. Different from it's predecessors Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 it is only available in two versions: The 'standard' and the 'datacenter' edition.

Our customers who rent dedicated servers can now chose between the new version and its fomer predecessors of the 2008 version, and all that in addition to a wide selection of Linux operating systems. Windows Server 2012 Standard Edition is available at only 19.99 EUR per month, the Datacenter Edition costs 99.99 EUR, but is worth every penny as it provides countless advantages.
And what applies to our Windows Server 2008 operating systems is true for Windows Server 2012 as well: Our customers can test the system free of charge for two months during which no additional costs will accumulate.

Clients who rent our virtual machines will be provided with the bigger Datacenter Edition which will be installed upon request at a rate of 6.99 EUR per month. And likewise our virtual servers can be operated with a wide selection of various Linux distributions.

Finally we have taken the opportunity of the launch of Windows Server 2012 to make a concession to all Windows Server 2008 fans out there. The new price for Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition has been reduced from 29.99 EUR to 19.99 EUR per month, when freshly ordered.

-------------------- The same text in german / der gleiche Text auf deutsch: --------------------

Nachdem Microsoft sein neuestes Betriebssystem für Serverumgebungen, Windows Server 2012, im vergangenen Monat offiziell fertig gestellt hat, haben sich unsere Techniker umgehend an die Arbeit gemacht. Wir haben für unsere Kunden zahlreiche Funktionstests und insbesondere auch die Integration des neuen Systems in unser "ASI" (Automatic System Installer) System durchgeführt, so dass wir heute mit Erfolg melden können:

Windows Server 2012 ist ab sofort für all unsere Rootserver und V-Server als Upgrade erhältlich!

Es kann von Neukunden direkt während des Bestellvorganges auf unserer Homepage, von Bestandskunden jederzeit via Email als Upgrade hinzu bestellt werden.

Microsoft hat die Einführung von Windows Server 2012 genutzt, um das Versions- und Lizenzmodell radikal zu vereinfachen. Im Gegensatz zu seinen Vorgängern, Windows Server 2003 und 2008, ist Windows Server 2012 nur noch in zwei Versionen erhältlich, nämlich in der Standard Edition und in der Datacenter Edition.

Kunden unserer dedizierten Server können - neben der üblichen, breiten Auswahl an Linux-Systemen - frei zwischen den beiden neuen Versionen sowie den Vorgänger-Versionen der 2008er Reihe wählen. Windows Server 2012 Standard Edition kostet lediglich 19,99 € pro Monat, die Datacenter Edition schlägt mit 99,99 € etwas teurer zu Buche, bringt allerdings auch zahlreiche Vorteile mit sich.
Genau wie für Windows Server 2008 gilt auch für das neue Windows Server 2012: Unsere Kunden können das System in den ersten beiden Monaten kostenfrei testen, während der ersten beiden Monate fallen keine Zusatzkosten an!

Unseren V-Server-Kunden stellen wir von Haus aus die größere Datacenter Edition zur Verfügung, die auf Wunsch für nur 6,99 € / Monat installiert wird. Auch für unsere V-Server steht daneben weiterhin die übliche, breite Auswahl an Linux-Systemen zur Verfügung.

Schließlich haben wir die Neueinführung von Windows Server 2012 noch genutzt, um auch den Liebhabern von Windows Server 2008 etwas Gutes zu tun: Der Preis für die Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition beträgt für neue Bestellungen ab sofort nur noch 19,99 € / Monat statt bisher 29,99 € / Monat.

On some day during the last week a very good customer who has been renting a Dedicated Server in our datacenter wrote us that he did not necessarily need the server at this time anymore, because the gameserver project he wanted to develop failed. No more need for a dedicated server you might think at this point. But did this great customer cancel the server with Giga-International.com due to vacany? Never ever! Have a look on the email conversation between the customer and our support department by yourself:

Customer:
"How important I am for you guys?
Just asking, because I'm bored. My gameserver hasn't been finished yet since there's no
players and server is useless for me at this time, but I would like to continue with my
server if there's something to do with it. Actually yes. There is, but I've to develop
everything from starting point.
Tell me. Do I continue? :3
"

Giga-International support department:
"
Dear Mr <customer's name>,
Thank you very much for your inquiry.
Please take note that unfortunately we are not really sure what exactly you want us to do.
Therefore we would kindly ask you to paraphrase your message and send it to us once again.
As soon as we receive your e-mail we will immediately respond back to you.
We are looking forward to receiving your soonest reply.
If you have any questions or need help, please do not hesitate to contact us.
--
Best regards,
Kundenservice / Customer support
"

Customer:
"
I'm thinking about continuing & renewing my payment. EVERYTHING JUST, BECAUSE CUSTOMER SUPPORT IS GREAT...
I do not necessarily need server at this time, because I don't have any gameservers that I
can run there, but I'll renew my payment and I can try think some gameservers. I can not
ever hope to be succeed with my gameservers. I'm losing my hope, because no one plays
there ever, but I think I'll buy at least a one month more of the server I already have.
If I don't try... I cannot be succeed.
Any great ideas what to do with dedicated?
Thanks! I'm always happy about this support. It's reliable, fast and really nice people
there.
"

That's what we call a great loyalty - we really appreciate having so kind and content customers!

I'd like to thank our nice customer that he gave me his permission to mention this incident in our blog.

Effective of today we change the official name for our virtual servers. Our offered hosting solution V-Server is called VPS from now on. VPS is the shortcut for Virtual Private Server.

After long consideration we have decided on a name change, because our experiences have shown that our customers prefer the more common name VPS, also in their correspondence with us.

Customers of Giga-Interational.com, please note:
You, as our customer, are not affected by this modification, nothing besides the name changes for you.
Please note that the invoices you are receiving from us bear the new product name from now on.

For hosting in a datacenter - or expressed in a more fashionable way - storing data in 'the cloud', there is one crucial factor:
A top quality, fast and secure Internet connection of the servers within the datacenter. Only this makes it possible to retrieve and make use of the data, stored and processed in the servers, in a way that makes sense, no matter where on earth the users are located.

Our customers around the globe appreciate the high quality level of the Internet connection in Contabo's datacenter, which is and has been guaranteed for a long time already, by the two worldwide leading "Tier 1" carriers Telia Sonera and Level 3, as well as by the glass fiber pioneering provider M-Net, who is presently supplying the city of Munich and its suburbs with glass fiber connections straight to the user.

We are now taking a further step ahead and are proving to our customers that even although quality has got its price, this price is incredibly low at Contabo. We do once again turn our business objective into reality: Providing the highest quality at the lowest prices, second to none.

All that is made possible by the large volume of the contingent that we purchase for several thousands of dedicated and virtual servers:
As of today, you can obtain Internet bandwidth/traffic at Contabo, for nearly nothing.

1. New server upgrade: 1 Gbit/s bandwidth - without shaping, 24/7 guaranteed. Only 399.99 EUR / month!
By choosing this upgrade your server is being connected to a 1 Gbit/s (=1000 Mbit/s) dedicated switchport (non-shared) which reserves the whole bandwidth volume of 1 Gbit/s only for you. You are able to use the full 1 Gbit/s with both your upstream and your downstream - 24/7 without limitations, no port capping, etc. We do guarantee this bandwidth allocation to you exclusively, thus, you don't share this bandwidth with any other server. Even if you should use the whole bandwidth all the time, we will not throttle your serverport!

2. Price reduction for the server upgrade: 100 Mbit/s bandwidth without shaping, 24/7 guaranteed. Only 39.99 EUR / month!
By choosing this upgrade your server is being connected to a 100 Mbit/s dedicated switchport (non-shared) which reserves the whole bandwidth volume of 100 Mbit/s only for you. You are able to use the full 100 Mbit/s with both your upstream and your downstream - 24/7 without limitations, no port capping, etc. We do guarantee this bandwidth allocation to you exclusively, thus, you don't share this bandwidth with any other server. Even if you should use the whole bandwidth all the time, we will not throttle your serverport!

3. Price reduction for colocation bandwidth: Dedicated, non-shared bandwidth - without shaping, 24/7 guaranteed: 50% cheaper, no matter how much bandwidth you order!
With this bandwidth module, we offer you dedicated bandwidth, which is reserved for you entirely and can be used in full, all the time ('non-shared'). Both upstream and downstream are useable simultaneously exactly up to the number of mbit/s you chose to order. No restrictions. No traffic limit.
Moreover, you can define yourself whether you want to use the ordered bandwidth as a flat rate with a fixed price or whether you prefer the 95th percentile billing method, which allows to exceed the ordered number of Mbit/s if necessary.
In addition to that, you can connect any number of servers (housing modules) to this bandwidth module.
If you do not want to use your own router or BGP, we will manage switching and routing for you - without any extra costs.
Even when starting with only 10 Mbit/s, this module has an impressive price/performance-ratio. But as always: The higher your number of Mbit/s, the cheaper your price per Mbit/s will get.

4. Discount for colocation bandwidth: 100 Mbit/s shared port, now only 9.99 EUR / month!
100 Mbit/s port and unlimited traffic for your colo-server(s) at a reasonable price? No problem.
With this bandwidth module, your colocated server can be connected to our shared bandwidth pool using a 100 Mbit/s port. The traffic is unlimited, thus you can use as much bandwidth as you want.
If you have ordered a '1 server (rack/tower)' housing module together with this bandwidth module, for example, your entire colocation package is complete at only 39.98 EUR per month.

5. Improvement for all dedicated servers which have not been ordered along with the 'dedicated bandwidth - 24/7 guaranteed no shaping' (see above) upgrade:
You can now use (uninterruptedly and continuously) up to 60 Mbit/s on average. Your port will not be throttled.

6. Improvement for all VPS (virtual private servers):
You can now use (uninterruptedly and continuously) up to 40 Mbit/s on average. Your port will not be throttled.

The Internet connection of your server has never been so cheap before and never ever have you been able before, to run bandwidth-intensive applications and homepages so easily!

Pick the Contabo server of your choice right now and get started:
http://contabo.com/?show=server

A few days ago Katharina gave you a detailed overview about the history of Contabo in her blog post “Contabo through the ages! The story so far…”.
Based on the mentioned most important milestones of the past 10 years we are going to publish now and within the next few days some pictures, photos and texts which we have been collecting during the last years.

Let’s have a look again on the chronicle posted by Katharina…

…and let’s go back to the very beginning when we put our first own rack server into operation at our first data center location in “Mainhattan”, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

In 2004 the first machines went online in the commonly known “Redbus Interhouse” at Lyoner Straße 28. At the beginning we just started with a space for 10 (or 15?) servers, but soon, our company had been growing fast, and thus, also the number of servers in our data center.
Not only we have been delighted about our rapid growth, but also our IT service provider who has been responsible for the handling of our hardware on site and who we worked with for more than 4 years, until we left Frankfurt am Main a little bit later.
Within a few months our server farm grew from 10 servers to 100 servers, and until today our business is expanding at an ever-increasing rate.

A few months later our long-term IT service provider decided to open another data center location a few houses away from us in Lyoner Straße 15. It was probably not only our very positive development which was responsible for their new data center, but we certainly have made an important contribution to that. At this time Giga-Hosting/ Contabo occupied the highest numbers of servers in their data center.
Today, 10 years later, the Tier1 carrier and global player “Cogent” has settled down right there, in the same datacenter we had used for many years at that time, with his German headquarter.

In the following you will find some impressions of our time (2004-2008) in Frankfurt am Main:

Our objective has always been to stay responsible for all of our servers. This means, we have chosen all single items and the infrastructure of our servers on our own and ,according to our ideas, we created server systems which were ready-to-use. We worked day and night to deliver our servers to Frankfurt am Main as soon as possible. And believe me, this was really hard work.

The following picture shows our already packaged servers shortly before its transportation to Frankfurt. According to the file attributes the picture was taken in October 2005 at 2:00 AM in the morning.

Giga-Hosting staff often travelled to Frankfurt to support the technicians there. I can warmly recommend “Motel 1” as accommodation because that’s where the team stayed during our visit and it was pretty nice.
It was situated between the airport and the data center and that’s why we haven’t seen a lot of the city during our stay.

This was the view out of our hotel room - we had to be content with a view towards another hotel instead of impressive pictures of the city centre and the famous Frankfurt skyline:

While we have been focused on the hardware and on the infrastructure of our servers, we took care of one of our most important matters: our product range.
When we started planning our company we agreed on three basic principles which focused on our customers and that have been applied consistently and uncompromisingly to this very day:

1) Discount prices
2) Instant service
3) The customer is king

According to these principles we operated day by day.
We were working hard to continually improve our products like webspace, servers, colocation, domains and its sustainable development. From time to time we offered radical price reductions but always together with high quality products and support.
This concept has been proven for years and it is still our company philosophy.

In the following you will find some impressions of some former marketing promotions and offers:

In March 2006 we opened the first office in Munich for our 1st and 2nd level support department. Since that time our team has been growing constantly.

If you are interested in more details about our history, stay tuned here on our blog. The story will be continued…

With the recent deployment of IPv6 in our data centre network, newly installed servers should be configured with an IPv6 address out of the box. For existing installations that you do not want to reinstall or colocation devices not installed with our operating system deployment solution, the necessary information needs to be added to your system manually. This guide should give you enough information to get IPv6 up and running on your server.

Obtaining the necessary information

We have already assigned an IPv6 address to every one of your services where applicable. You can find this address in your customer control panel, which should look like this:

Do not use the address space shown in the image, "2a02:c200:0:10:3:0:7:1". Use your own IPv6 address space from your customer control panel instead.

At this time, the following additional information is valid for every IPv6 enabled server:

netmask / prefix length: 112
gateway address: fe80::1
dns servers: 2a02:c200:0:10::1231:1 and 2a02:c200:0:10::5002:1


Initial configuration (Linux-based operating systems)

Before adding this IPv6 address to your configuration files and thus making the changes persist after a server reboot, you might want to configure it manually. I will use the IPv6 address 2001:db8::1 in this example. Please replace it with the appropriate address assigned to the server in question. If your network card is not eth0, you will have to replace "eth0" with the appropriate value, too.

Add the address to the server's network interface in the format /:

ip addr add 2001:db8::1/112 dev eth0

You can validate that the address has been enabled by running

ip -6 addr show

which should show, among others, the following lines:

2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qlen 1000
inet6 2001:db8::1/112 scope global valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

In order to reach the everyone else in the ever growing IPv6 world, add a default route to the server's configuration:

ip route add default via fe80::1 dev eth0

Again, you can verify the setting by running

ip -6 route show

which should show the following output:

default via fe80::1 dev eth0 metric 1024 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295

You can now check your IPv6 connectivity by using the ping6 command:

ping6 2a02:c200:0:10::5001:1

Making things persist (Linux-based operating systems)

Different operating systems have different ways of setting up the network configuration. If in doubt, please search the documentation for your operating system. Sample configurations for Debian/Ubuntu and CentOS/Fedora/RedHat will be provided here. Please be very careful when applying this changes. Errors may result in your server no longer responding to any network traffic at all!

Debian / Ubuntu

Edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and add the following lines:

iface eth0 inet6 static
address 2001:db8::1
netmask 112
gateway fe80::1
accept_ra 0
autoconf 0
privext 0

CentOS / Fedora / RedHat

Make sure IPv6 networking is enabled at all by editing /etc/sysconfig/network. Add the following line to this file:

NETWORKING_IPV6=yes

Then add the IP configuration to the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6ADDR=2001:db8::1/112
IPV6_DEFAULTGW=fe80::1
IPV6_DEFAULTDEV=eth0

This should make sure the IPv6 address gets enabled again after your server reboots.

Configuration steps for Windows Server operating systems

After you have connected to your server using RDP, click on "Start" > "Control Panel" > "Network and Internet" > "Network and Sharing Center". Click on "Change Adapter Settings" on the left side of the window. Right-click the icon for the network connection, select "Properties" from the menu:

Highlight the entry "Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IP)" on the list, make sure that the checkbox is ticked and click on "Properties" again. Enter the information you gathered from step one as shown below:

Click on "OK", to close the dialogs and save the changes.

Still cannot reach your server via IPv6?

If you have made the changes as described above and if the ping6 command did return a response but you nevertheless cannot reach your server via IPv6 from your local computer, chances are that IPv6 might not yet be enabled in your local network. Your local ISP can help in this case.

Our Dedicated Servers and VPS's with cPanel are very popular among our customers. The easy to use administration panel renders web hosting possible comfortably even for inexperienced Linux administrators. Almost all settings can be done via WHM, SSH access is rarely necessary.

We deploy cPanel servers automatically with a working standard configuration. Most settings are left default, some had to be added to make the server accessible. I want to show you a few points that are important after the installation.

The following steps can be done in your server WHM. Please log in to https://[server-IP]:2087 as root to continue.

Even if you have not worked with the WHM interface yet, you will be able to navigate through it easily. I find the search bar very useful to access the needed function quickly. It acts similar to the Windows 7 start menu search.

1. We start with Basic cPanel & WHM Setup.
1. Notice the contact e-mail address in the first configuration line. We recommend to change it to a personal address to keep being informed about server activities. cPanel is quite verbose, so a separate in-box is advisable.
   
2. You will find the default nameservers at the bottom of the page. We have predefined our nameservers here. Domains that you bought from us will work out of the box using this setting. If you run domains on other nameservers, you can define their addresses here.
2. We continue with Configure Remote Service IPs. Choose the tab Remote Name Server IPs here. The following list of IP addresses are associated to the nameservers defined before. If you only use domains from us, no changes are necessary here. If you have domains on other nameservers, you can add their IPs to the list. Else cPanel will refuse to add those domains as addon domains.
   
3. The next point is Change Hostname. Our predefined hostname does not resolve to your server IP by default. You will have to define a new one with a working domain to avoid problems with e-mail transmission. You may leave the first section as it is, e.g. "vmi1234.example.com". If you use a domain that is not hosted on our nameservers, make sure to add an A entry for the sub-domain in your DNS management.
   
4. A correct RDNS entry is another important factor for RFC compliant e-mail transmission. The PTR of an IP must match the server hostname. Please use our Customer Control Panel to set the entry for your server IP, e.g. "vmi1234.example.com".

After these steps, your cPanel server is ready to fulfil all general hosting tasks. If you need more help material, please see the comprehensive cPanel documentation.

In this tutorial, we are going to mount an additional hard drive in Windows. As you may notice, we will do so in Windows Server 2012, but the procedure is basically the same with Windows Server 2008.

At first, we need to open a menu by right-clicking the Start button:

We must select Disk Management to open the Disk Management service. If Windows identifies a new hard drive, a pop-up menu opens:

For volumes smaller than 2 TB, we choose MBR, for larger disks, we select GPT. As the hard drive in our example only has a capacity of 100 GB, we'll go with MBR here. By clicking OK, the chosen partition table will be written to the hard disk. After that procedure, we will be sent to the main menu of the Disk Management service. Alternatively, one can reach this overview via Control Panel => Computer Management.

As we can see here, our new hard drive is listed as Disk 1. But before we can use it for storing data, we need to partition and format it. Therefore, we right-click the rectangle next to the box which says Disk 1 and choose New Simple Volume.

A wizard opens. It is quite self-explanatory and you can't do anything wrong by using the pre-selected and suggested values. Per default, the wizard uses the whole disk capacity for the new partition and formats it with the file system NTFS, which is recommended for Windows. Of course, you are free to change those settings, but in our example, we go along with them.

The name of our new partition is STORAGE, but of course you can name it as you wish.

Once you went through the wizard, the new hard drive will be ready to use. It will also be visible in the Explorer: