Slicehost

No more wait list, we’ve caught up with the backlog. On another note, several of the regular Campfire chatters are now hanging out in #slicehost on irc.freenode.net, so if it seems a little empty, you might want to check in there. Have a nice weekend everyone!

Topfunky has an awesome screencast (peepcode) showing you how to setup a Rails stack with Capistrano deployment features on an Ubuntu server from an OS X development environment, using the deprec gem. And it’s free. I’m a big fan of the Peepcode screencasts, just a great idea. I look forward to them each month.

Peepcode – Rails stack on Ubuntu using deprec

You might also want to check out Craig Ambrose’s article on using deprec w/ a Slicehost VPS. I haven’t played with deprec much but plan to soon.

Wishing everyone a great 2007!

Happy holidays. Just an update for new users joining via the signup codes. We’ve temporarily suspended new users because of some sporadic problems on the new server batch. Once we solve the problem, we’ll start taking customers again. Discussion thread here.

Scotty over at HostingFu tagged us, so here are 5 things about Slicehost you didn’t know.

1. We became friends at college because we were the only guys double majoring in EE/CS and had all of our classes together.

2. Everything is developed on Macbooks using Textmate.

3. I live across the street from both the NOC and office (downtown STL).

4. We tried to invest in this before starting Slicehost, but couldn’t come up with the funds.

5. Everyday we have a mandatory Ze Frank viewing and celebrate Ride the Fire Eagle Danger Day weekly.

And we tag: Yurii, Tristan, Adrian, Claudio and Daniel – get your 5 things ready guys.

They’re ready! You’ll be getting an email shortly if you signed up via the wait list. If you can’t hold out for that email, stop by the chatroom and ask us for the code (if it’s still in place).

Heads up – emails coming out shortly that will completely cover everyone who has been waiting patiently for a Slice. Sorry for the delay, we had a couple of hardware failures in the new batch and had to do extensive testing to make sure the others were OK. Happy holidays and thanks for your support.

MORE

I wrote this in a hurry, but wanted to share a little more. The servers are installed and running, as is some new network equipment. We’ve made a few backend changes are putting these modifications through their paces. If all goes well, we should be crossing off several customer requests such as extra storage, backup goodies and more in the next few weeks.

Interesting article on how hosting affects search results. Makes sense – faster loading pages are crawled more frequently?

One of the newer features of the Google Webmaster console is that to control the relative frequency of Googlebot visits – with the option to turn down the frequency for those sites which may struggle with the bandwidth / load. t’s not a major stretch, then, to assume that the amount and frequency of spidering is based in part on the page response time – if Google detects a slowing in page response rate, it may slacken off the spidering in response to that. Perhaps the effects of a quick page response are more important than the rate of spidering – could Google be using this data to build a profile of responsiveness across sites? Could this be yet another factor in ranking?

It sucks to be sold out. But rest assured, the servers keep coming and we’re working our way through the back order list. The good news: we have our largest server order to date on the books. So if you signed up, it shouldn’t be more than 10 days before you can get your hands on a Slice. Until then – thanks so much for your patience and support.

Ok, so Etch isn’t quite officially final yet, but due to the number of requests for a current 64-bit debian we’ve decided to go ahead and put out the latest version available. Happy Hacking!

We hope to address 2 customer requests with our most recent distribution. First, Debian Sarge – an old and familiar friend. Reliable, trustworthy – ready now for your Slicehosting needs. Second, some people occasionally have trouble with 64-bit compatibility issues, so Sarge is 32-bit. We’ll likely follow this with a 64-bit Etch build after its scheduled release next month. Enjoy!

We had a major network outage Sunday morning starting around 0900 CST. More details to follow, but in short, a routing loop in Chicago seems to be the culprit. Sincere apologies for the outage.

Sorry, we’re sold out until tomorrow afternoon when a new shipment arrives.

UPDATE 11.13.2006 6:11pm, open for business again.

We’ll be starting Xen upgrades in the next few days. You’ll be receiving an email with the date and time we plan to upgrade your server. Ideally, the downtime will be one reboot, as we shutdown and restart the box. If there’s a problem, we’ll roll back. Most importantly, if you compiled anything with our kernel, please get in touch with us, since the kernel will be upgraded in this maintenance. Check the forum discussion thread – as always, we’re open to questions and comments.

We think everyone will be quite pleased with this update, it addresses performance and scheduling on SMP machines. See this post for a benchmark comparing Slices on previous Xen versions.