Frequently Asked Questions

Sales Questions

Do you offer free chunks or a free trial?

We're sorry, we don't do that anymore. However, if you're at all unsatisfied with your chunk at any time we're always happy to give you a refund! So please feel free to sign up and try us out! We also bill in one second increments (minimum one cent) so you could likely try everything you want to try for a penny!

What makes a chunk?

Our physical servers are loaded with ECC RAM, dual hexa-core energy efficient AMD processors, and most importantly RAID 10 (mirrored and striped) hot-swappable SSD drives. The mirroring means double read performance and complete redundancy, but we also make free weekly backups of all chunks to a separate backup server to mitigate the potential of any catastrophic loss. We run Xen to give you a fully virtualized server on top of our physical server, in whatever size and with whatever OS image you specify when creating it!

How much CPU do I get?

Xen (the virtualization software that runs your chunk) is very good about CPU scheduling. 99% of the time CPU isn’t really an issue, but if somehow all the chunks on a machine were all trying to max out the processor at the same time, you would be guaranteed the same ratio of CPU as you have of the total machine memory. Again, remember you can always burst to the unused portion of all twelve cores!

Do you have an SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

Yes! We offer an unconditional 100% network and server uptime guarantee. Individual chunks are not covered under the SLA, because you are completely responsible for what you do on it. But, if your underlying server or the overall network goes down at all for any reason, we will automatically credit your account a 100% prorated refund for the time it was down.

Where is my chunk?

Currently, all our chunks are in the Peer One data center in downtown Los Angeles.

If I shut down a chunk mid-way through a month, am I still charged for the full month?

Nope, we do utility-like billing, so you're billed only for the time you used (down to the second, with a minimum of $0.01)! The unused portion of the month will be credited to your account.

If I choose to pay a hardware upgrade fee over two years, am I now in a 2-year contract?

Nope, you can still destroy your chunk at any time and you will no longer be billed!

What happens to my hardware fee if I shutdown the chunk it was for?

We just keep track of how much you've paid so far, and when you later spin up another chunk the amount you've already spent will be applied towards that one's hardware fee!

Can I have more than one IP on my chunk?

Yup, extra IPs are $5 a month. And you can add them from your panel automatically just by clicking on the chunk you want to add them to!

Is there a way to purchase more hard disk space without extra ram or CPU?

We don't offer any a-la cart upgrades: the plans are designed to balance the resources of the underlying host machines! Using something like s3fs is a good way to easily store extra stuff on S3 so you never have to worry about disk space!

Do you have private IPs for internal networking between my chunks?

Yes ma'am! All your chunks automatically get a private IP for free that you can use within the same datacenter without going on the public Internet or counting towards your bandwidth quota.

If I have multiple chunks, is my bandwidth per chunk or pooled over my whole account?

It's per chunk!

How fast is the uplink for my chunk?

Depending on how much other chunks are using, the chunk could get something approaching 1gbps per second down. Upload is 100mbps.

You can test it yourself with our download test page: http://speedtest-lax1.chunkhost.com/100mb.test

How much do you charge if I go over my bandwidth quota?

Just 2 cents a GB.... cheap!

Can I see some benchmarks?

Sure!

Can I pick the datacenter my chunk is created in?

It's not possible, unfortunately. However, after your chunk is created, please contact us and let us know which one you want them in, and we'll move your servers for you.

Can I run my own mail server?

Sure! Just don't spam, we'll catch you. And SHUT YOU DOWWWWWWWWWWN.

Do you block any ports?

To prevent spammers from signing up and flooding the net with their junk, we block ports 25 & 587 by default for new accounts. Once your account has been active for a bit you can disable that block from the management interface, and if you need it immediately, just drop us a line!

Does OpenVPN work on Chunkhost?

It sure does! You're getting a standard Ubuntu (or Debian, CentOS, or Arch) server here.

Can I mine for crypto-currencies on Chunkhost?

Sure, you can do whatever you want (besides spam, Tor exit nodes, DOS attacks, or other violations of the Terms of Service). However, we strongly discourage you from mining cryptocurrency on anything except a special hardware. Usually, it is unprofitable and won't cover costs for the electricity. Also it will consume lots of resources and affect other users, so we will have to pause/terminate your account.

Can I run a game server on Chunkhost?

Yup! Again, everything is fine besides spam, Tor exit nodes, DOS attacks, or other violations of the Terms of Service!

Why can't I run a Tor exit node?

We've got nothing against Tor, but we are proactive about keeping abusive traffic off our network and if the Tor node causes any problems or abuse complaints, we'll likely disable your chunk, and you telling us "well, it wasn't me, it was a random Tor user" won't prevent that (since you agreed to be responsible for your chunks' traffic).

If you want to contribute to the Tor effort, a relay node is at least something and shouldn't have the same problems as an exit node.

Can I host adult content?

As long as your content is legal and you hold the copyright for the content it's okay!

Does minecraft work on Chunkhost?

Yup, it works pretty great and is a very popular use case!

How do I cancel? Is it a real pain?

All you do is delete all your chunks! Don't worry, we'll remember any hardware fees you've already paid and credit them towards future chunks when you (inevitably) return.

Why "chunk?"

_why, indeed:

Billing Questions

I paid using bitcoin but it did not give me the 5% off

The 5% off is included in the conversion from USD to BTC. We used to show each step in calculating the BTC amount but people would get confused.

Technical Questions

I already have a domain. How do I use it with your system?

Set your registrar to use ns1.chunkhost.com and ns2.chunkhost.com as your DNS servers. You will then be able to manage your domain from the DNS section of our panel.

Do you support IPv6?

We don't, and we can't. Unfortunately, the infrastructure is not there yet -- we need high end routers to handle it, and they don't. Hurricane Electric offers IPv6 space that they will tunnel to you, but you're on your own.

What Operating Systems do you support?

We currently support Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora and Arch). We don't have immediate plans for supporting Windows or other Linux versions (Gentoo for example), but we'll mention it on Twitter if we do: http://twitter.com/chunkhost

I created a chunk and added an SSH key, and I did not get an email with the root password

When you give us an ssh key to add to the root user, we still set a random password but don't email it (the idea being that people who want to use SSH keys don't want to have their root passwords emailed around in plaintext).

So just use the SSH key you provided, or you can reimage without any SSH keys and you'll be emailed the random root password we set.

To un-select your SSH key when you reimage, you might need to shift- or control-click in that select box. If nothing is selected we'll email the password.

My Chunk is crashy, can you check your logs and investigate the issue?

We don't have any special access to your chunk as compared to a physical server in our datacenter. There's no special access so mostly we just see requests for resources and startups/shutdowns, so we don't have any insight into the crashes.

Usually if it's even somewhat orderly you'll see entries in /var/log/syslog corresponding to what's up; often if you run memory-intensive stuff the OOM (Out Of Memory) Killer will knock off important-ish processes like the web server or SSH server or whatnot.

Generally in those cases the chunk is pingable and you should be able to log in via the Emergency Console on https://chunkhost.com

But it's hard for us to tell from the outside. If you can let us know when it's hung (if the use-case allows for a bit of downtime) we can poke around and see what's up, but generally the log files will tell you what you need to know!

Network is very slow. Is it on your or my side?

If you ever see latency or throughput oddness, the best thing to send us to help diagnose things is a traceroute (or better yet, a short session using a tool like "mtr" to show results over time)!