Slicehost

Celebrate good times. You speak, we listen, cool stuff happens. A major customer request was console access. Now why would you need console access when you have SSH?

• you might accidentally lock yourself out via firewall (never happens right?)
• SSH can fail
• you misconfigure a server and it can’t boot propoerly

Previously, you had to open a support issue to get this resolved. No longer! Just login to SliceManger, click the [console] link next to your Slice name and let the magic happen.

Pretty wicked eh? This shouldn’t replace SSH as your remote access method, even though it is encrypted over HTTPS. The console is mainly for emergency use or a quick check in when you only have browser access. But we’re certain it will make your life easier someday and that’s what we like to do.

Now who can you thank for such coolness? Jason of course. He forced Ruby, Rails and Python (ajaxterm) into the same room, then convinced them to play nicely. Too smart for his own good that guy. Pop into the chatroom and let us know what you think. As always thanks for your input – it’s how we make things better around here.

A server required an emergency reboot just after 12am CST this morning. This was due to a runaway process and an LVM hang that degraded performance. Slices were gracefully shutdown with a downtime of just over 90 seconds. If your Slice was on this machine, you have already been sent notification. Apologies for the trouble and we’ll work to make sure it’s avoided in the future. Please relay any feedback you might have.

Came across a new, free monitoring service that looks pretty sweet. Montastic is written in Ruby and looks to be a simple service that will solve the needs of most users. Each account gets up to 100 monitorable servers, checked at a minimum of once every 10 minutes. In the event a of failure, an email alert is fired off. Check out the demo video here.

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!

Scott from HostingFu has posted a great review of our product. Thanks Scott, for taking the time to put together a thoughtful and informative post for the VPS community. And regarding the console access – we have something up our sleeve ;) . More to come…

Want Ruby on Rails goodness for your Slice in less than 5 minutes? Checkout the 5-minute Rails Install on our Wiki. Enjoy!

The guy behind the Ruby on Rails podcasts (topfunky) has started a unique service called Peepcode. Every month, he releases a video tutorial, usually about an hour long, that costs $9. Honestly, when I first read the announcement, I thought it sounded novel, but couldn’t imagine myself using it. I skipped the first episode on RJS templates. But when the second episode came out, covering Textmate Basics, I bit. I’ve been longing for a quick tutorial exposing me to some of the more advanced Textmate features and hoped this would be it.

All I can say now? What a fantastic idea! I highly recommend this service – excellent quality, quite effective and reasonably priced. I wasn’t sure if a video would help me “learn”, as I tend to be more of the book type, but it was a neat experience. I’m looking forward to future releases. And hats off to Topfunky for a fresh approach. RoR, despite our feelings, is still bleeding edge. A video tutorial is a fast, effective way to keep people abreast of the latest and greatest. And an order of magnitude advantage over dead tree competitors.

By popular demand, Gentoo 2006.1 is now available as a distribution choice. One warning, if you’re rebuilding/adding/creating a Slice, it does take longer than the others (about 90 seconds) to create – so please be patient. Next – we’ll be working on OpenBSD, which after Gentoo is a popular request.

We now handle the RDNS zones for our IP blocks. Turn around should be much faster – if you submitted a previous request, it has been completed.

First – an apology to all of our customers. We experienced 30 minutes of downtime today, around 1pm. That’s unacceptable and we’re working hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

• 1245 CST: Slicehoster Matt T. pops into the chatroom and asked if he was the only one who couldn’t reach his box. I sarcastically responded yes, about 15 seconds before our phones started beeping and the alarms sounded. Predictably, all heck broke loose.

• 1247 CST: I call the NOC. We recently doubled bandwidth, but were having trouble seeing the increase on our side. A NOC engineer was plugged into our backbone switch to investigate. I take off in a sprint for the NOC (tall programmers are not the most graceful runners), while Jason and others man the phone/chatroom to relay updates.

• 1252 CST: Huffing and puffing, I arrive at the NOC to discover the backbone router is off. Engineer admits he may have bumped it or maybe it failed. Power is cycled. But this doesn’t look good, a bump shouldn’t put a router on the fritz.

• 1257 CST: After a few failed reboot attempts, it becomes apparent something else is very wrong. More investigation via the console points to a memory problem. We reseat all of the memory in the device.

• 1307 CST: More reboot attempts after reinstalling the router lead nowhere. Cutover to emergency backup device which requires upstream changes.

• 1315 CST: Everything is back online.

• The router did indeed have a bad memory chip. This prevents it from booting. A replacement is on the way.
• HSRP, scheduled for later this month, was not yet in place. This falls on us.

Again, we aplogize for the outage, it should not have happened. Something got fried and we didn’t have the proper failovers in place. This will be remedied soon. In the meantime, everyone is back online and there shouldn’t be any noticeable difference. And the network should feel faster ;). Please contact us with any questions and thanks again for your support and words of encouragement in the chatroom.

Every Slicehoster can appreciate this.

Random updates for Slicehosters:

• We’re working on taking control of our Reverse DNS. Currently we have to go upstream for requests which is taking a bit longer than we hoped. The process should be fixed this week (at least we hope).

• We’re working on allowing customers to purchse extra IP’s or storage space.

• The forums now support RSS/Atom feeds.

The referrals program is in effect. We decided on using email addresses for the referral code, to be referenced during the signup process. This seemed good because we figured people might not sign-up right away after reading a site or blog post. However, some are now asking for referral codes to pass via URL, so we’ll get started on that too.

Current customers – check the Accounts tab in SliceManager. Have people reference your email address during the sign-up process and after 90days your account will be credited. Enjoy!