Where exactly are Virtbase servers located?

All of them are in the SkyLink Data Center in Eygelshoven, in the south of the Netherlands, close to the German border near Aachen.

Is my data stored inside the European Union?

Yes. The building is in the Netherlands, so your data stays in the EU and is processed under the GDPR. Our privacy policy lists what we process.

What does Tier 3 standard mean?

It describes the building, not the servers. A Tier 3 facility has more than one power and cooling path, so maintenance can happen without switching customer equipment off.

What happens if a power feed fails?

Nothing you would notice. Each rack is fed from two separate paths and our hosts have a power supply on each, so one feed can go away without interrupting anything.

Which internet exchanges is the data center connected to?

DE-CIX Frankfurt, Speed-IX and Nikhef Amsterdam, over redundant fibre. That keeps the route to German and Dutch networks short.

Can I visit the data center or get remote hands?

No. Virtbase is a managed VPS product, so customers do not have physical access to the racks. If something needs doing at the hardware level, ask our support team.

One data center, in the Netherlands

Every server we run sits in the same building: the SkyLink Data Center in Eygelshoven, a few minutes from the German border.

Eygelshoven, Netherlands

Just over the Dutch border from Aachen, inside the EU, close to Amsterdam.

Two power feeds

Every rack has an A and a B side. One can fail and your server stays up.

Contained cold aisles

Cold air is walled in, so the top of a rack runs as cool as the bottom.

Redundant fibre

Two paths out of the building, into the Frankfurt and Amsterdam exchanges.

Why the Netherlands

Eygelshoven sits on the Dutch side of the border, a short drive from Aachen. German traffic barely leaves the region, and Amsterdam and Frankfurt, where most European networks hand traffic to each other, are both close by.

Your data also stays inside the EU and under the GDPR. If you are in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, you get latency that feels local without your data leaving European law.

Power

Tier 3 is a design standard: the power and cooling can be worked on while customer equipment keeps running.

Each rack is fed twice, from an A side and a B side, and the two never meet before the server. Our hosts have a power supply on each. If a feed drops for maintenance or because a PDU fails, the machine carries on running from the other one.

Two independent power feeds, A and B, each reaching a separate power supply in the same host system.

Either feed on its own carries the full load.

Cooling

Chilled air is pushed into a closed aisle between two rows of racks. Because the aisle is walled off, the air has nowhere to go except through the servers.

The result is that a machine at the top of a rack draws air at the same temperature as one at the bottom. Servers that get warm start throttling, and throttling is a common reason cheap hosting feels fast one minute and slow the next.

Cross-section of a contained cold aisle: chilled air enters the closed aisle between two rack rows, passes through the servers, and leaves as hot exhaust on the outside of each row.

Containment is what keeps intake temperature even across the whole rack.

Network

The fibre into the building is redundant, and it reaches DE-CIX Frankfurt, Speed-IX and Nikhef Amsterdam. Traffic to German and Dutch networks usually stays regional instead of crossing the continent first.

Every server also sits behind aurologic's DDoS protection, on every plan, at no extra cost. Attack traffic is filtered upstream and never reaches your uplink.

Network topology: Eygelshoven connects over two independent fibre paths each to Nikhef Amsterdam with Speed-IX, and to DE-CIX Frankfurt.

Every link is two independent fibre paths.

Security

Getting into the building is controlled and monitored. That part is easy, and on its own it protects less than people assume.

So we lock the machines down too. Every host has a boot lock with TPM and BIOS passwords, which means nobody can start poking at a server just by standing in front of it. Every disk in our Ceph cluster is encrypted with LUKS2, so a drive that leaves the building has nothing readable on it.

There is more on this in how secure is Virtbase.

Who runs the building

The facility belongs to SkyLink Data Center BV, Bart van Slobbestraat 16B, 6471 WV Eygelshoven. The hardware in it is ours. We buy and run our own servers rather than reselling capacity from someone else.