Your own machine, without the datacentre.

One physical machine divided into several virtual ones, each with its own share of processor, memory and storage set aside for it. KVM gives each of them its own kernel, so a neighbour's load — or a neighbour's mistake — stays on the neighbour's side of the wall. It is the isolation of a dedicated machine without the price of one.

Root access, and what it lets you do: install what you like, configure it the way your application needs, run something the shared platform does not offer. The trade is that the machine becomes yours to look after — which is the right trade when you have outgrown a panel, and the wrong one when you have not.

cPanel and Plesk licences can be added to the server when you configure it, billed monthly alongside it. Which ones appear depends on the plan meeting that panel's requirements and on the provider quoting the licence — so the configurator shows the ones your chosen plan can actually have, rather than a list you have to check yourself. Choose none if you administer the machine yourself.

Yes, as a paid add-on at the same step. Useful for some TLS setups, and for sending mail from an address whose reputation is yours alone.

On a server with root access, the backups are yours. Nothing on the machine is kept for you unless you arrange it, and we would rather write that here than let you find out after an incident. Send copies off the server, schedule them, and restore one occasionally to prove it works — the support section has a guide that walks through it.

Up, within the same family of plans — and it is not something you can do yourself from your account yet, so get in touch and we will size it with you. Downgrading is not offered: an allocation that can shrink under a running application is not the stability a server is bought for.

Current long-term-support Linux distributions are offered at creation, and because you have root you can replace or rebuild the system afterwards.

Managed services is an add-on: the provider administers the server for you — patching, monitoring and support — instead of you doing it yourself. Without it the machine is yours to operate, which is the right choice if you already have that discipline.

The allocation is set aside for your instance rather than borrowed from neighbours as burst credit, which is what keeps performance flat rather than spiky.