24 of 48 images
Rare Operating Systems
Twenty-four of our 48 images are systems almost no host will boot for you. Here is why we keep them, and what happens when yours is not on the list.
CrestVPS ships 48 operating system images. Twenty-four are systems no mainstream host will install: 9front, Haiku, SmartOS, OpenIndiana, MINIX 3, ReactOS, DragonFly BSD, HardenedBSD, GhostBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, NixOS, Gentoo, Void, Devuan, Slackware, Talos, Flatcar, VyOS, OpenWrt, RouterOS, Whonix Gateway, Parrot and a Qubes-style Xen split. They are one click in the deploy panel, on the same hardware and the same network as everything else. Median provisioning is 47 seconds; a rare image is not a slower path. Signup is an email address. Payment is cryptocurrency through OxaPay. The rest of this page explains why the library exists, where the boundary sits, and what to do when the image you need is not in it.
Why a host carries images nobody asks for
The honest answer is arithmetic. Building the image pipeline is the expensive part: automated builds, serial console capture, virtio driver checks, a boot test per release. Once it exists, the marginal cost of one more image is a build slot and a few gigabytes of storage. 9front costs us almost nothing to carry. The second reason is who turns up. The engineer who wants a DragonFly box for HAMMER2 testing is usually the engineer who signs off on the fleet, and the fleet is fifty ordinary Debian servers. Rare images are not charity. They are how the ordinary work arrives.
Anything that boots on KVM
Take it literally, with limits. Every guest runs under KVM with virtio-blk, virtio-net and virtio-scsi, a serial console, VNC on the emulated VGA, UEFI or SeaBIOS, and a CD device you control. Systems without virtio drivers, ReactOS among them, fall back to emulated IDE and e1000. That works. It is slower. What we do not promise: guest agents, in-guest metrics, or a support engineer who knows your OS. We keep the machine, the console and the network correct. Above the boot loader, the system is yours. The 15 Tbps of inline DDoS scrubbing sits in front of every image, including the ones with no firewall of their own.
Custom ISO and iPXE netboot
Two escape hatches. Upload an ISO to your account over HTTPS and attach it to any server as a virtual CD: boot, install to the virtio disk, detach, reboot. The image stays private to your account. For anything you would rather not upload, switch the server to iPXE netboot: it chain-loads a script from a URL you control. That is how people bring their own Talos configuration, a PXE-driven Gentoo install, a memory test or a forensic image. Console access is VNC plus serial over SSH throughout, so an installer that only speaks to a serial line still works.
Directory
The images
01
9front (Plan 9)
current
9front, the maintained fork of Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Everything is a file server, including the network and the window system. Run by distributed-systems people, protocol archaeologists and a small, active development community.
Deploy →02
Haiku
R1/beta5
An open-source rewrite of BeOS, API-compatible with it. A desktop system, not a server one. People run it here to build packages, test ports against real hardware timing, and keep BeOS-era software alive.
Deploy →03
SmartOS
2025Q1
An illumos distribution from Joyent: hypervisor-first, boots from a read-only image into RAM, with ZFS, DTrace and zones underneath. Run by shops that want zones and KVM under one kernel and no package drift on the host.
Deploy →04
DragonFly BSD
6.4
A BSD forked from FreeBSD 4.x, built around the HAMMER2 filesystem and its own approach to SMP. Carried for HAMMER2 snapshots and replication, and by developers who need a second BSD to test portability against.
Deploy →05
NixOS
25.05
Linux with a declarative configuration and atomic rollbacks. The whole machine is one expression in the Nix language. Run by teams that want reproducible builds and byte-identical rebuilds across a fleet.
Deploy →06
Talos Linux
1.9
A Linux distribution for Kubernetes with no shell, no SSH and no package manager. Configuration and management happen entirely over a gRPC API. Run by operators who want the node surface as small as it goes.
Deploy →07
VyOS
1.5 rolling
A Debian-based router OS with a single configuration tree, commit and rollback. BGP, OSPF, VPN and firewalling in one image. Run as a cloud edge, a VPN concentrator, or lab kit for network engineers.
Deploy →08
Whonix Gateway
17
The Whonix Gateway half: a Debian system that forces all traffic through Tor and hands the machines behind it a leak-resistant network. Paired with a workstation VM or your own servers. Run by researchers and journalists.
Deploy →FAQ
Rare Operating Systems
No. Every image except the licensed Windows ones is included in the server price, and the OS you pick does not change the invoice. Windows Server 2019, 2022 and 2025, and Windows 11 Pro, carry a licence fee of EUR 14-19 a month, with vTPM 2.0 available for Windows 11. Billing is monthly or annual at 30% off, and fleet discounts stack on top from three servers upwards.
Support covers the platform: the host, the disks, the network, the console, the ISO mount, the netboot chain. If an image will not boot, or virtio is misbehaving, that is ours to fix. If your Plan 9 file server is misconfigured, that is yours. We do not pretend to operate every system we carry. Tickets reach an engineer rather than a script, and we will tell you plainly which side of the line a problem sits on.
PULSE on the Ryzen 9 7950X for a single box. NITRO on the Ryzen 9 9950X with pinned cores when the system is effectively single-threaded, which most research kernels are. VAULT for ZFS work under SmartOS or OpenIndiana, with NVMe cache and up to 32 TB. FORGE for memory-heavy builds at up to 16 GB per core. TORQUE for dense dedicated cores, FUSION when a GPU has to be passed through.
No. Signup is an email address and we never ask for identity documents. That is a privacy position, not a jurisdictional one. Every server sits in a named country, across 36 cities in 33 countries, and CrestVPS answers valid legal process from that jurisdiction. We publish a transparency report twice a year. Abuse handling is identical whether you booted Debian or a Qubes-style Xen split.
Ninety seconds from here to root.
There is no hourly billing, no negotiated rate and no sales call. You pay monthly, or annually at 30% off. Servers ordered together take another 3, 6 or 10% off the whole invoice, so a ten-server annual order settles 37% below the monthly list price.