I can't believe I let my Mephisto-powered blog run on Dreamhost for so long. DH is great in how they provide super-affordable, reliable hosting with gargantuan bandwidth and space. They even support Rails quite well. The inherent problem is that my Rails apps take up about a gig of ram when they're all being served and I was making things unfun for the other DH customers.
Luckily Slicehost rocks so damn hard that I don't need to worry about that now. I'm serving all my sites on an 8-core AMD64 Gentoo system for less than half my monthly cell phone bill. So if you notice anything feeling snappier around here you can chalk that up to those barons of St. Louis running the Slicehost datacenter.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Trevor Turk // Sep 28, 2007 at 06:08 PM
Agreed. I moved from Dreamhost to Media Temple to Slicehost, and I’m absolutely blown away with them.
Sure, it’s nice to not fight the system to get a Rails app running. Sure, it’s nice having a rock-solid host with little-to-no downtime. But the real kicker is how blazingly fast all of my sites run on Slicehost. I love it.
2 Superbnerb // Oct 21, 2007 at 04:56 AM
I’d love to see exams of a slicehost’d site that is using a 256 slice. Is Hoopla! on such a slice?
It’s been awhile since your posting, so are you still happy? any updates?
3 Jack Danger // Oct 22, 2007 at 11:53 AM
Supernerb: I’m still very happy with Slicehost!
Hoopla! is on Slicehost – as is http://adpickles.com (the startup I work for), http://afterharrypotter.com, and IIRC http://railscasts.com
It’s the most kaboom for your dollar that I’ve found anywhere. It’s basically the same as http://www.EngineYard.com but without all the crazy good custom support that EngineYard offers.
I still HIGHLY recommend Slicehost.
4 Aaron // Oct 22, 2007 at 06:13 PM
Why does slicehost take so long to admit new customers though? Kinda seems silly to wait 2-3 months for a virtualized server instance, the very kind of thing that one might expect to receive in a matter of minutes.
5 Jack Danger // Oct 23, 2007 at 04:05 PM
Apparently it’s a cashflow issue. They want to stay profitable so, after discussing it with the community, they decided to switch to a waiting list. You can jump up in the list if you’re able to commit funds up front for them to buy some new hardware.
I don’t know all the details of their finances but I know that it would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to get all the servers that everybody wants right away.
6 Sam // Oct 30, 2007 at 12:42 PM
Agreed. VPS is the way to go and slicehost is a good company. They care more about doing a good job for existing customers than maxing revenue and I guess that’s the reason for the wait list. I got an account before the waits began and it’s been a been a breeze. There were only two minor hiccups over the course of my first year with them. On one occasion they had to reboot a server and I was notified three days in advance. The other was an IP address change but that caused me no downtime. They do an excellent job.
PS – I just checked my uptime – 131 days on my reboot, not theirs.
7 Luis // Jan 02, 2008 at 03:46 PM
Moving to slicehost was the best choice, slicehost fits most needs.
8 Brandon // Jan 15, 2008 at 09:45 PM
I have to agree. I’m the CTO for TSheets.com and Slicehost has been absolutely great. Fast servers, fairly inexpensive, great response to support issues.
At one point I discovered a security hole in their default Debian installation and they had it fixed in just about 1 day, and were even nice enough to give me some free service credit for helping them out.
9 Jack Danger // May 21, 2008 at 12:29 PM
Slicehost used to have a wait time but not anymore. You should be able to get right into your new slice when you’re ready for it.
10 Dedekind // Aug 01, 2008 at 05:47 AM
I second that Danger. I signed up for Slicehost yesterday and it’s sweeeeeet. Got it immediately.
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