September 15th, 2006
Your input requested
We’ve picked up several new customers this week who were migrating from trouble at other providers. Everyone has outages, so we wish those guys a speedy recovery. But downtime is the fastest way to lose customers and that’s the nature of this game. So our question to the new folks and people still considering us: what can/should we be doing better? What did your previous hosting companies do good/bad? Please let us know – we’re listening!
March 17th, 2008 at 10:00 PM Scott
Obviously you can have redundant and reliable hardware, hot backup servers in DC ready to swap, but downtime is in some sense inevitable. In the case of unixshell# it is really unfortunate that one disk in raid10 and the raid card itself got fried at the same time which caused total destruction :(
Really. Customers should do regular backups themselves to defend against the worst.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:00 PM Kaya
I recommended to unixshell# that they buy a central file server (perhaps clustered file server from Isilon) to backup their primary drives automatically. One might even be able to use it as VM primary storage.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:00 PM TR1
One of the things that i like about DH, is the referal payout. Perhaps this is necessary due to other shortcomings, such as: poor control panel, downtime, and shortage of valuable online support.
Slicehost has been great so far, i have had to use the chatroom a couple of times, and it has been a pleasure. The wiki, although lacks some breadth at this point, is very clear.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:00 PM will
Amusingly, That’s exaxtly why I just bought a slice. I don’t mind a few outages – they happen. But the repeated problems wasted my time.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:00 PM jenocin
Better documentation, I guess that will come in time, but I passed your site over a few times because of the lack of information. Most of the big hosts and a lot of the little ones have excellent wikis/faqs/forums/and just plain websites. I didn’t realize how new you guys were so I am sure that will come. I think another thing that set me off at first was the provided “services” not working, again since you guys are new, I understand you guys are still working out the issues. I am speaking of the console login and also the backups. Maybe more choice of operating systems. OpenSuse, read that you are getting debian, maybe slackware. Things that put me off on other hosts were the controlability. On hostrocket, I was stuck with what they provided. DreamHost was much more lenient, but still I was stuck with fcgi for applications (ruby/python/etc) and no java/mono etc support. So I basically split my domain across that host and this and we’ll see how it turns out.
Another thing I’d point out is that ssh isn’t specifically mentioned, and no dns. You should at least point out that you “could” run your own and since its not shared hosting w/o ip addresses it can just get an A record. Other than that I am still getting setup, but things look good so far. I bring these things up because I asked for thoughts about you guys from the freenode channels and those are things they pointed out until I corrected them.
March 17th, 2008 at 10:00 PM jenocin
Oh yeah another thing, discounts for purchasing larger blocks of times, heck even the ability to prepay for larger blocks would be nice.