Slicehost

The Slicehost team keeps growing and I’ve got a backlog of blog hazing!

First, we seemed to have missed welcoming Ant, who’s been doing all sorts of systems and backend magic since the Rackspace deal last fall. He’s in San Antonio and you Debian lovers have him to thank for getting Lenny slice-ready in addition to getting the DFW datacenter live.

Joining Ant as an allstar Linux ninja is Major, a Racker who moved over full time to our team. He does all the hard work around here and “Ask Major” is a popular phrase in the office.

Two new folks on the midnight shifts: Adam slid over from Rackspace and Alan is here in St. Louis. You night owls will find them manning SliceChat and drinking unsafe amounts of Red Bull and coffee. Stop in and wake them up, I mean say hello.

Jon is our new data center guy here in STL, you won’t find him in SliceChat because he’s always tinkering in the DC and keeping those machines purring.

Lastly Ismail and Demond are 2 new day-shifters in St. Louis. Ismael is armed with a shiny new Masters in CS and speaks fluent Turkish for those of you that like to learn new languages via Linux troubleshooting. Demond started this morning, so we’ll take it easy on him :)

A big welcome to all the new Slicers!

Debian 5.0 was released earlier this week and it’s now available for all of your Slicehosting needs. A big thanks to Ant for his hard work getting it prepped for production. Enjoy!

Hook’em Horns! Gig’em Aggies! How ‘bout them Cowboys! Texas forever!

I’ve run out Texas propaganda, but am delighted to announce that slices are live in the Rackspace Dallas datacenter. We’ve been working hard on this since the announcement last October and it’s a big step for us. First, a huge thank you to all of the Rackers who helped turn up the new facility, they’ve been awesome and completely top-notch. Second, we are pumped to offer customers geographically diverse options for backup/redundancy/load-balancing purposes. Third, we have plenty of room to grow in the new facility and are working harder than ever on geeky goodies you are sure to love.

Now what does this mean? Q&A below.

Q. Where are your datacenters?

A. We have 2 facilities in St. Louis (STL-A and STL-B) and now DFW-1.

Q. Where are new customers going?

A. New customer are going to DFW-1, previously they went to STL-B.

Q. Where do slices go when I add them?

A. Additional slices are automatically added to your local/default datacenter.

Q. Can I pick where a new slice is built?

A. Not at the moment. If you’d like to add slices in a datacenter other than your default, just contact support and we’ll do it for you. DFW-1 is a great option for those of you in STL that require geographic diversity for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Q. Can I move existing slices to DFW-1?

A. Not automatically. You’ll need to contact us to build a new slice in DFW-1, then rsync data from the old slice.

Q. Can I create a new slice in DFW-1 from a backup in STL?

A. Not at the moment, but we are working on solutions.

That’s all for now, if you have any other questions please let us know. As always thank you for your support!

Just a quick heads up that we will be performing switch upgrades that will affect a portion of the STL-B data center.

Customers may see brief network hiccups as the upgrade takes place.

The maintenance window is Friday January 30, 0600-0700 GMT.

The maintenance is not expected to impact Slices but Slicehost support will be in the chatroom relaying updates and assisting with any issues.

Let us know if you have any questions.

UPDATE: Maintenance completed.

Just a reminder, I’m in San Francisco this week and would love to meet up. I’ll be at Ritual Roasters this afternoon for a few meetings, swing by if you’re in the neighborhood. Tomorrow afternoon I’m around Hayes Valley and will tweet my location. Shoot me an email (matt AT slicehost) if you can make it!

I’m headed to Mountain View, California this week for Cloud Connect. We’ll be talking all things Slicehost at the Speed Geeking and Chalk Talk portions of the conference and I’ll be joined by EJ from Cloud Files and Adrian from Cloud Sites. Please stop by and grab me if you’re at the conference.

If you can’t make it to the conference, I’d still love to get together with Slicehost customers and customers-to-be. I’ll be around the Silicon Valley area until Friday morning and will be heading to San Francisco the following week. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks – bring your techie friends I’ve got the Amex card :) Shoot me an email (matt AT slicehost) or call (314.266.3502) to set something up. Be sure to follow our twitter feed as I’ll post any impromptu meet-ups.

The free version of Mike Mayo’s Slicehost iPhone app has finally been approved by Apple and is available now at the App Store. The $1.99 Pro version has been out since late December and allows you manage multiple accounts via the API. There’s been a great response to the app, check it out and let Mike know what you think.

Mike’s post on the free version

Check out a couple of cool tools popping up from the Slicehost community.

SliceMonitor – a Slicehost widget for OS X by Ludwig Pettersson

Mike Mayo is working on an iPhone app for managing your Slices

Both of these use our API and we love seeing what people can do with it. If you have any suggestions or a tool you’re working on, let us know!

Paul pointed out this morning that several people have joined the Slicehost team and we hadn’t done the customary blog post. We did mention everyone in our video chat last week, if you missed it please give a warm welcome to:

Josh K from Wisconsin who will be working overnight support. Josh has a background in Linux administration.

Ben B from North Carolina working daytime support. Ben previously worked in software QA and Linux administration.

Ben H from Chicago working daytime support. Ben comes from a development and administration background.

Josh and the two Bens were Slicehost customers before joining and have really improved our support coverage.

We also picked up two people from Rackspace:

Mark B in San Antonio working overnight support has been with us since October. He’s been a fantastic help through this process and hit the ground running.

Sabrina G who recently moved from Texas to St Louis and has been assisting with operations. Everyone at Rackspace referred to her as a “superstar” and she’s lived up to that reputation.

They’ve been here a month or longer, but if you missed them stop by the chatroom and say hello. We’re growing fast and having fun – if you’re located in St Louis and interested in joining us, get in touch!

As promised, we’ll be doing a livechat this Thursday and answering your questions. We think this will be a fun change from the podcast and a great chance to discuss our future. We’ll be joined by Lew Moorman from Rackspace and will be broadcasting via Ustream. You can ask questions while watching the show, through Twitter or in SliceChat. We’re hoping to start around noon CST and will go for at least an hour. Please join us!

UPDATE Should start between 12-1230 today and will go as long as questions are coming in. We’ll discuss the acquisition, future plans and what’s been going on lately. You can join us in the Ustream channel or ask questions via IRC/Chat/Email/Twitter.

UPDATE 2 – Video below.

Per customer requests, we’ve added a second Twitter account (@slicehoststatus) for alerts and tech updates only similar to status.slicehost.com. Our regular Twitter account (@slicehost) is higher volume and can be used for general tweets and Q&A.

This is a precautionary notification that the local power company will be working on the community service feed for the STL-B data-center building from 0500-1200 GMT on Nov 6. During this window, we will be off utility power and running on generator power. There will be multiple representatives on hand from the power company, the building operations group, our data-center and Slicehost. We do not expect any customer impact during this window but wanted to relay the notification we received. As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

Related power maintenance in STL-B from July

Jason and I got to sit down with Robert Scoble last week before the big Rackspace event. It was such a thrill! We’ve watched countless Scoble interviews and there he was asking us questions. The video interview is online at FastCompany.tv now – check it out and let us know what you think.

What an amazing day for Slicehost and our customers! Our acquistion by Rackspace has been announced and we couldn’t be more excited. Jason and I started Slicehost two years ago and it grew beyond our wildest dreams. Selling the company was not in the cards. So what changed? A few months ago the Rackspace team invited us to talk – we couldn’t have walked away more impressed. In Rackspace, we discovered a larger version of ourselves – a hosting company passionate about their customers and the technology behind their business. As the process leading to the announcement unfolded the top notch people we encountered, along with their attitudes and knowledge of the industry, assured us we were making the right decision.

We believe that Slicehost and Rackspace are fantastic complements to each other. Our technology strengthens their position in the cloud hosting world. Their expertise, experience and resources enable us to improve our product and continue meeting our customers’ needs. Fear not loyal Slicehosters, we promise to keep doing what we’ve always done – listening to you and building a product that solves your problems. Now we have one of the largest and most respected names in the industry standing behind us. So please join us in celebrating this announcement, but not for too long. We’ve got to get back to work and have big plans ahead. As always, please send us your thoughts and questions. Thank you for your support!

Rackspace Slicehost FAQ

Jared recently posted his thoughts on the Slicehost Summit. Several great pictures are up, the result of him creeping around like a ninja snapping shots when we least expected it.