A JumpBox is a virtual appliance that dramatically reduces the pain involved in running Open Source web applications. It bundles an application and all dependencies together into a virtual machine that is quick and painless to deploy on virtualized infrastructure. There are more than 50 different JumpBoxes available for many of the best Open Source applications around and Genesis can provide hosting for any of them. You can learn much more about JumpBox and the applications available on the JumpBox web site.

Started in 1997, Genesis is a high-availability virtual infrastructure provider. We offer individual virtual machines running on our shared VMware ESX Enterprise clusters as well as dedicated VMware ESX Enterprise clusters all for a low monthly cost, especially when compared to Amazon’s EC2, GoGrid, and some of the other “cloud” providers.

Hosting a JumpBox with Genesis provides you with a reliable, high-performance, and scalable environment. As your needs grow, our environment will grow with you. If you have a specific need, feel free to contact us.

Typically, it takes between 30 minutes to 4 hours to provision your JumpBox. If you need one in a hurry, please let us know. Immediate provisioning is coming soon.

There are NO setup fees.

No. Each hosted JumpBox costs $45/month, period.

We offer the same 15 day money back guarantee that JumpBox offers. If you are experiencing problems, please click here to access support, and if we can not resolve your issue, then we will happily refund your money.

Pricing is per JumpBox instance per month and you can run as many different JumpBoxes as you would like. Just let us know which JumpBoxes you would like to use and we'll get you off and running.

Most providers host 1,000’s of web sites on a single server, and if that server fails, all web sites go down until the provider can physically get to the server, diagnose the problem, and repair the server or possibly re-build it. Restoring 1,000’s of web sites takes time. There are known cases where this can last for days.

Our infrastructure is fully-redundant including our server components, the servers themselves, network and storage switches, the storage disks and storage controllers, and Internet connectivity. If a server fails in our environment, such as the example above, that server’s virtual machines are restarted on other servers in our cluster, so downtime is minimized to less than 5 minutes, all automatically. However, it is uncommon for us to have a complete failure of a server due to the redundancy of the components in our servers and our storage network. We also use genuine HP equipment, which has a proven track record of being very robust and reliable.

In addition to the physical infrastructure being redundant, VMware's software provides many features that allow us to provide continuous service even while upgrades of our physical infrastructure is in process. For instance, we can move the storage for your JumpBox instance from one of our storage networks to another without downtime. If the CPU load on one of our physical machines increases to the point where performance will suffer, our cluster will move your JumpBox from one physical machine to another without downtime.

Cloud computing has become quite the buzzword and is often used inaccurately. Cloud computing, sometimes known as Grid Hosting, is simply a marketing term for virtual machines. Virtual machines are software partitions of a physical server, so a single physical server can be “split” into many pieces that each appear like a whole server. Genesis provides a similar service, but we sell CPU, Memory, and Disk resources a la carte, where other providers sell virtual machines with specific limits on resources and limited tiers of service.

VMware is the company that wrote the software Genesis uses to virtualize our servers so we can run virtual machines throughout a large number of physical servers with features that are Enterprise-class. VMware is the leading virtualization platform owning over 85% of the market and is used by ALL of the Fortune 500.

Many providers will indicate they host VMware servers, but typically they are illegally using the free software that VMware provides to the public (called ESXi) to entice them to buy. Genesis has invested heavily in the high-end Enterprise edition of VMware’s ESX for all of our clusters, giving you the benefits of VMware’s Enterprise platform.

Some examples of features you won’t find elsewhere include:

historical performance statistics unlimited snapshots console access high-availability CPU, storage, and network CPU, Memory, and Disk resources a la carte multi-tenant security available at the virtual machine level upgrade to Genesis' full-featured shared or dedicated service

Historical performance statistics will give you a graphical picture of how your JumpBoxes are performing including graphs of CPU, Memory, and Disk activity real-time, the past day, week, month, or year.

Snapshots allow you to save a copy of your JumpBox at a point in time that you can revert to. For instance, if you need to perform an upgrade or change content on your JumpBox, but run into problems, you can “undo” these changes back to the time when you took the snapshot. Unlimited snapshots are included with the service.

Console access gives you control of your JumpBox as if you were sitting in front of its monitor, if it was running on a computer on your desk.

Each JumpBox is dedicated, so your application is not shared with any other customers. If you have a particular version of your JumpBox application that you are happy with, there is no need to upgrade. So, you upgrade when you are ready, not when your provider demands it, a JumpBox is a great choice. You are in control of your environment, not your provider. For example, no longer will your favorite plug-ins break when your provider upgrades! You choose when to upgrade and when your plug-ins are ready.

JumpBoxes also offers a larger selection of high quality open source applications to choose from than most shared hosting providers.

Snapshots are also available so when you need to upgrade plug-ins, update application components, or add new content, you have the ability to create a snapshot before changes are made, and undo all changes if something goes wrong.

Yes. Almost any machine can be hosted on our platform. Please contact us for details.

We have allocated multiple shared pools of bandwidth for JumpBox customers with a capped upstream bandwidth of 10Mbps (traffic coming from your JumpBox to the Internet) and a capped downstream bandwidth of 100Mbps (traffic being download to your JumpBox). We do not charge additional for bandwidth. If you have special needs for high-bandwidth applications please contact us.

We allocate the JumpBox-recommended memory for your JumpBox which varies per JumpBox. Additional memory is available for $7.50/month for each additional 256MB.

We allocate the JumpBox-recommended disk space for your JumpBox which is currently 1.5GB for the boot disk and 10GB for the data disk. Additional storage can be purchased for $0.50/GB per month.

Normally, yes. We suggest that you purchase a domain from your favorite registrar such as Godaddy, Google, Network Solutions, etc. and point it to your JumpBox’ IP address. If you need assistance, let us know.

Yes! We backup your JumpBox on-site daily. Backups are stored for 7-days. Backups consist of the entire JumpBox virtual machine (but not snapshots). Additional retention is available for an additional cost of $0.25/GB/7-days. We charge a restore fee of $40 per incident where you need us to recover the JumpBox from our backup systems. Restores typically take 3 hours from your request to your JumpBox running again. We can also restore to a new virtual machine, leaving your old JumpBox running temporarily, in case you need to copy data.

JumpBoxes also include their own backup feature that allows you to store backups off-site on Amazon’s S3. Amazon S3 service charges will be charged by Amazon Inc for any usage of the S3 service.

A JumpBox Open Subscription is not required but discounts may be available if you are an active JumpBox Open subscriber.

JumpBox Open subscribers can save $10 per month on each JumpBox that we host. Just let us know you are a subscriber and provide the email address associated with your JumpBox Open account and we'll include the discount during setup.

The JumpBox for Ruby on Rails is an excellent deployment platform for Ruby on Rails applications.
Don't forget that we offer snapshots with the service, so if you need to test deploying an application or snapshot the environment when you are various stages of your application development, and want to revert back to a point-in-time, it's literally the click of a button.

There are JumpBoxes available for both LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby) and LAPP (Linux/Apache/PostrgresSQL/PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby) deployment.

If a new JumpBox is released for the application you are using, just contact us and we'll provision a new instance so that you can migrate to the latest version. Upgrades are handled through the standard JumpBox upgrade mechanism and are not automatic to insure your site isn't broken unexpectedly, unlike other hosting providers.

One of the compelling features of a JumpBox is that you can easily deploy multiple copies wherever you need to. If you don't already have a subscription, signing up for JumpBox Open will provide you download access to the entire JumpBox Open library along with a $10 per month savings on your hosted JumpBoxes.

We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover as well as PayPal. We also accept purchase orders from accredited educational institutions, government agencies, and corporations.

Yes! We offer 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month pre-payment discounts of 5%, 7.5%, and 10%, respectively.