How We Manage Security: Virtual Private Servers

We often get questions about security regarding virtual private servers. In this post we will cover how we handle security; our thoughts about it, and what we do to maintain the highest possible security towards our customers.

Isolation

When you order a VPS through Ilait, we deliver a virtual private server installed on a virtual hard drive, which is a block storage device. The VPS is pre-installed with an operating system of your choice and we also set a strong and unique password for your VPS. For storing the data, we use several storage area networks (SAN) each with fault tolerant smaller storage pools. A storage area network is a dedicated storage network that provides access to consolidated, block level storage.

Block storage means that the VPS get access to blocks of data that is isolated from other instances in the shared network.

By using redundant storage pools, the system isolates the performance which means higher dependability for the individual VPS. Even though it's a shared network, the performance is granted for each storage pool within the network.

Encryption

We don't encrypt the data and that is for two important reasons. Firstly, if we did the encryption it would mean that we'd have the encryption key. We could at any time decrypt the data and the whole point of securing data would be gone for our customers. If we'd implemented encryption, the performance of our service would also decline remarkably.

Secondly, we provide a block level device directly to every virtual instance where you can adapt the encryption level that is best suited for your data. This gives you every opportunity to set the security level on your data yourself. Most of the commonly used operating systems have encryption support available in the system so it will not mean an extra cost for you.

Recommended Actions

We recommend to change the password you get from us when you order a VPS even though it's a strong one. If you want us to get access to your virtual instance in order to support, we recommend that you create a separate account with required access. Rather than giving us full administrator access.

You should always ask yourself how sensitive your data is and seriously consider the encryption possibilities. When you encrypt the data you have complete control.

To summarize it all, within the scope of our acting space we deliver virtual private servers that qualifies for the highest possible security levels from a technical point of view.