Learn more about our services:
At IHQ we are neither managers nor advertisers. We do not invest money in technology because it can be a potentially successful business move. We are IT professionals actively involved in developping Web technologies. Our services are designed to provide direct answers to the needs and problems we have to face everyday in our career.
Based on our experiences, we have decided to launch IHQ and to assemble an affordable Web hosting offer that would bring together security, flexibility, and availability.
An affordable offer:
For only $5.99 USD/CAD per month, without any subscription or long term contract, we offer 2GB of disk space, 50GB of monthly transfer, and an environement which fully supports the features listed here:
- PHP
- Perl
- Python
- MySQL
- Multiple websites
- Multiples SSL certificates for each client (using mssl )
- SSH/SFTP access
- Crontab access
- SVN repositories (subversion)
- Webdav shares
- Email mailboxes and aliases
- DNS Management
- Data are stored on miroring RAID at minimum (RAID-1)
- Three ways to manage an account (Web panel, command line, PHP API)
- Secure and controled environment
We monitor each of our servers to prevent abuse but the most significant limitation we put on client's account is the disk space quota, because our systems keep all client data within the account. So it's up to you to decide which portion of your account is used for mailboxes, databases, or websites.
Availability:
- 2GB of real available space (reserved)
- Maximum of 100 clients per processor core (cpu)
- 50GB of maximum transfer per month
One popular practice among web hosts is to maximize the number of clients on a same server to optimize revenues. For example, if 200 clients each have an account offering 1GB although they effectively use an average of 70MB of disk space, it may seems efficient to increase the number of clients on that server or to advertise a bigger disk space that what is available globally. However those methods have other implications in practice because it reduces the resources availability. Because in reality those clients share not only diskspace, but also memory, processing power, and bandwidth.
Our policy on that matter is simple. We use the disk space as a guarantee of the availability of our resources. When we offer 2GB, it means that each client has exactly 2GB of disk space reserved at all time. We also keep a maximum of 100 clients per processor core (cpu). Finally, the transfer limit offered to our clients is not a random number, our servers are located to strategic nodes of the Internet network and we monitor everything in order to fix a realistic limit based on the bandwidth consumed by our clients, as well as our global capacity. Our policy on availability prevents that the shared resources we provide become insufficient when more clients register. Also, this policy removes the need of setting up ridiculous limitations to our clients like imposing a cpu limit that would prevent a client to fully use the resources he as paid for.
Security:
- Privilege separation
- SELinux strict policy
- Abuse control
Security sould be the main preoccupation of web hosts, but it's still far from being the case. Most companies will apply known solutions, without really thinking about maintenance, and without really understanding the reasons behind it. At IHQ, we have designed a method which allows to create a separation between the environments of each user, and which prevents many common privacy and security problems. In addition, on a more technical side, we have build our own SELinux STRICT policy, which monitor every operation occuring on our servers, and provide a secure and stable environment to our clients.
