Affordable, high specification
Bare Metal Servers
for your most intensive workloads.

We've been in business since November 2011. We started with a single colocation server and we progressively scaled to hundreds of high-end servers in multiple datacenter facilities. Although we host most servers from the United States, our headquarter and staff are located in Canada.

At this stage, we are mostly working with existing clients to support their growth and to keep them happy. If what you want is out of stock, you are welcome to contact us. We may be able to help. We don't offer low-end servers or, at this time, servers newer than Broadwell.

We own all servers offered. We do not lease, rent or resell anyone else's servers (unless we are specially requested to do so by our customer). We own all access and distribution layer network equipment connecting our servers. We own all IP addresses assigned to our customers. We are a member of both ARIN and RIPE. We currently own and manage over 20,000 IP addresses. We do not own the datacenter facilities we operate from. We rent colocation space and we leverage the datacenters' remote hands services and NOC.

We can install any custom or off-the-shelf operating system provided that it is freely available for download or provided an ISO from you. This includes all Linux variants, Windows Server, VMware ESXi, etc. You are also welcome to install your own operating system yourself using the IPMI remote console of your server.

We do not offer any software (operating system, control panel, etc.) license. Such licenses must be purchased from your own channels.

We do not offer server management services; our servers are sold as unmanaged services. The responsibilities of Heymman Servers are limited to ensuring that your server is powered up, has healthy hardware and is connected to a functioning, healthy network. For issues related to the software being run on your server, we typically have to ask you to obtain assistance from your own channels. Our services are targetted at IT professionals or organizations with access to such resources. We can reinstall your operating system on request, if needed.

All abuse reports (copyright infringement, phishing attacks, spam, etc.) are manually screened, then forwarded to the corresponding customer. Customers are generally allowed 24 hours to resolve the abuse before a null route is instated. In case the abuse isn't resolved and/or the customer isn't responsive or the severity of the abuse demands immediate termination, then the abusive IP address will be null routed. Customers who do not adequately manage their network or who are believed to be directly engaged in abusive activities will be terminated. For more details about our policies, please refer to our Acceptable Use Policy and our Terms of Service.

Our Kansas City datacenter facility isn't designed to filter network attacks. In case of an incoming network attack, we are generally able to only null route the targeted IP address. The null route will be maintained until the attack has subsided. If this is a recurrent issue, then we may have to ask you to seek a solution from a third party provider, such a service offering tunneling of clean traffic, or your service may be terminated. Services provided from our Amsterdam location are delivered with DDoS protection up to your allowed limit of 40 Gbps or 6 Mpps (shared).

We fully support IPv6 in all our locations. You are welcome to submit a demand for a free IPv6 assignment. Because of hardware limitations, we can dynamically route traffic for /116 and smaller subnets only. Larger subnets will require justification and a static route.

Additional IP addresses can be ordered in CIDR subnets for $0.50 per IP address per month, subject to availability and proper justification.

Demands for announcing subnets are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. We do not provide BGP sessions, so all subnets must originate from one of the ASN's we operate from.

Most services are permitted up to 100TB of monthly traffic (measured as the sum of ingress and egress traffic). See your order form. There is no port speed limitation and we do not block any port. Budget providers tend to run congested networks. We don't. You can expect to be able to use your network port to its full extent at any time. Since we do not operate a particularly rich network, you can expect a certain level of inefficiency upstream. For instance, achieving low latency to Asia is difficult. More broadly, high single-threaded transfer speeds is often difficult. If you intend to benchmark an enterprise network, we encourage you to use multiple iperf threads to and from a private iperf server.

Modern desktop computers are designed to boot very quickly. The highest quality, enterprise-grade servers have a very long POST routine during which a large number of tests and checks are performed to ensure the proper operation of the server. Additionally, the presence of an hardware RAID controller also adds approximately a minute to the routine.

The SP SL230s comes standard with an HP H220i HBA (host bus adapter), which is a rebranded LSI 2308. These systems are also equipped with an HP B320i RAID controller (with no cache memory).

Note : Before enabling the HP B320i RAID controller, the first and last sectors of each drive must be erased (there must be no metadata present on the drives). Before exiting the HP ACU, the newly created virtual drive must be selected as the primary and secondary boot drive in the "Set Bootable Logical Drive/Volume". Failure to follow these instructions will result in the system failing to POST until the drives are physically detached.

To wipe out the first and last sectors of the drives, a proposed method is to boot the server into a rescue environment (e.g. from a CentOS installation disc) and to run :

# dd bs=512 count=10000 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=0
# dd bs=512 count=10000 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek={last_sector - 10000}

You can find the number of sectors using :

# blockdev --getsz /dev/sda

Subsract 10,000 to this number and write 10,000 sectors to overwrite the last 10,000 sectors. Repeat for each drive, replacing /dev/sda accordingly.

The following screenshot shows how to set the bootable drive :

We tested the HP H220i HBA and HP B320i RAID controller with CentOS 7.6 and the XFS filesystem. For the following command :

# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

We obtained the following results :

- No RAID on HP H220i (1x 500GB Samsung 860 EVO) : 200 to 220 MB/s.
- Software (mdadm) RAID-10 on HP H220i (4x 500GB Samsung 860 EVO) : 350 to 380 MB/s.
- No RAID on HP B320i (1x 500GB Samsung 860 EVO) : 400 to 450 MB/s.
- Hardware RAID-10 on HP B320i (4x 500GB Samsung 860 EVO) : 550 to 590 MB/s.

We ran disk benchmarks on Windows Server 2016, using CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Disk Benchmark. The CrystalDiskMark results are as follows :

The ATTO Disk Benchmark results are as follows :

These results show a tremendous improvement when enabling the HP B320i RAID controller. In fact, in the single drive scenario, the drive can roughly reach the full manufacturer's specification of 550 MB/s sequential reads and 520 MB/s sequential writes. In the RAID-10 scenario, we observe that the HP B320i performs roughly 15% less (both in reads and writes) than a modern, top-of-the-line RAID controller in Write Through mode (e.g. an LSI 9361, see the same article in the "Specific to the quad E7-4870 offer" section of this FAQ for additional benchmarks). We therefor conclude that the HP B320i controller does not constitute a substantial bottleneck to modern SSD's, in comparison to modern, top-of-the-line RAID controllers in Write Through mode. On the other hand, the HP H220i HBA significantly bottlenecks the write performance of the SSD's. We therefor strongly recommend to enable to HP B320i RAID controller.

The HP B320i RAID controller can be enabled from the "HP Dynamic Smart Array B320i RAID Controller" menu in the system's BIOS. The RAID array can be created from the HP Smart Storage Administrator (ACU) utility. Our tests show that it is crucial to enable the "Physical Drive Write Cache State" setting in the "Modify Controller Settings" menu. We recommend to disable the controller cache setting. We did not measure any significant difference between a 128 KiB / 265 KiB and a 256 KiB / 512 KiB Stripe Size.

All conventional operating systems have built-in drivers for the HP H220i HBA. HP provides closed source drivers for the HP B320i RAID controller for a number of operating systems, including and limited to Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016 and (unofficially) 2019 as well as VMware ESXi 6.5 and older and Red Hat / CentOS 5, 6 and 7. If installing a supplemental, custom kernel (e.g. Proxmox or CloudLinux), compatibility will be lost. For Windows operating systems, the drivers have to be slipstreamed in the installation media. For VMware ESXi, a custom ISO, freely available on VMware's website, has to be used. For Red Hat based operating systems, a driver disc has to be created and the drivers have to be loaded using, for instance, the inst.dd boot option. Here are articles to assist with these tasks :

- Tool to slipstream drivers to Windows 10 : https://www.ntlite.com/
- Creating a CentOS 7 driver disk : https://www.marcanoonline.com/post/2016/07/red-hat-enterprise-linux-and-centos-7-driver-disk/
- Loading drivers to the CentOS 7 installer : https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/installation_guide/sect-driver-updates-performing-ppc

Heymman Servers will install all Windows, Red Hat based and VMware ESXi operating systems with the HP B320i RAID controller enabled to ensure that our customers benefit from the highest level of performance.

To access the iLO3 IPMI management interface of your HP server, please direct your web browser to the URL ("IPMI address") that was given to you and use the username and password that were given to you when your server has been provisioned. From this interface, in the "Remote Console" tab, in the left panel, and the "Remote Console" menu element, you may launch the IPMI remote console by clicking on "Launch" under "Java Integrated Remote Console", which will provide you with KVM access to the server. Please make sure that your Java security settings allow the Java application to run. To be able to run unsigned Java applets, the IPMI IP address has to be added to your Java "Exception Site List", in the Java Control Panel. From the Java applet, you may also emulate an ISO of an operating system, in the "Virtual Drives" tab and "Image File CD/DVD-ROM" menu element, should you want to install your own operating system. Should it ever be needed, you may also power cycle your server from the "Power Management" menu, under "Server Power".

If you need further assistance, please consult the following video tutorial or contact us.