Do you allow background processes?

Question:

Do your shells support background processes?

Answer:

Hi,

It depends on what you need to run. In general we do not allow background processes. We do not restrict background processes but we also do not encourage them. The goal is to keep our servers stable and running smoothly.

If you need something to run in the background it will run. We cannot guarantee a process will run forever though. We have a monitor that will kill things off after a certain amount of cpu time has been used up.

Also, no irc bots, bouncers, etc. are allowed at all.

So if you really, really need background processes we are probably not for you. If you just need to spawn things every once in a while or experiment with small servers you’ve wrote it should be ok.

I hope this helps some!

Can I run a server process?

Question:

Do you allow us to run a web server application i.e a server process (multithreaded). My application is an online pdf generator. My traffic is going to be very less i.e it is for private use.

Answer:

These types of question are hard to answer because it can depend so much from case to case. In general we recommend that
you try the app out and see if you hear from us. If there is a problem we will disable the app and let you know. In most cases it is fine.

There are a few server processes that we do not allow: bnc, bots, etc. – anything IRC related (sorry but cause of many problems) .

Parsing RSS and changing file attributes

Question:

If I purchase a hosting account from you, will I be to use PHP scripts to parse RSS feeds on my website assuming that I set it correctly? And will I be able to change a file or folder’s attribute settings once I have uploaded the file or folder to my domain?

Answer:

Yes. After you sign up, go to the php-options section of the control panel and turn on the fopen function for remote URL’s. For security reasons, we have it turned off by default. After you turn it on you should be able to fetch and download RSS feeds fine.

You can also chmod files from inside php assuming you either run php as a cgi or (the default) run it as the php module and have the file in question be world writeable.