Slicehost

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.

We’re growing our support team and Slicehost customers happen to be some of the best talent around! If you love Linux, working on your slice and sharing what you’ve learned with others, this is THE job for you.

What does the Slicehost support team do?

• communicate with customers via email, chatrooms and forums
• troubleshoot system problems and customer issues
• administer and configure Linux servers
• write tutorials for the wiki/forums detailing common server and software configurations
• design proactive solutions for common/recurring problems
• research and develop new products and features
• contribute to the stability of the Slicehost community

We’re hoping to add several people and are fine with remote work. If this post made your heart beat a little faster, email us right away (jobs AT slicehost.com). You might include a resume, your Slicehost story, how you can help our team or a few of your favorite geeky things. We’ll be in touch if it looks like a match – hope to hear from you soon!

UPDATE – we got lots of greats responses and these positions are currently filled. Thanks to everyone who sent in resumes!

Our biggest podcast ever! Jason, Jared, Paul, Tony, Mike and me all in the same room. We have some feature announcements, recap Slicehost highs and lows, discuss the Slicehost summit and more. Intro music is “Player’s Club” by NWA featuring Too Short and “Time to Pretend” by MGMT.

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We have a feature for larger customers called bandwidth pooling. It means that the monthly bandwidth allowance is metered against the total bandwidth of a customer’s slices. For example: 4×1024slices = 4×400GB = 1.6TB total bandwidth. As people employ multiple slices and take advantage of private IPs for communication, it made sense to enable this across the board. Today we’re pleased to announce that bandwidth pooling is a standard feature and monthly bandwidth allotments are now equal to the total bandwidth across your slices.

What a Monday morning in the Slicehost office! The legendary Pickled Onion joins us from across the pond, he’s huddled in the corner longing for a good cup of tea. Jared’s in from California and brought good weather with him. We’ll be having some fun this week and hope you can join us for dinner/drinks on Thursday evening. Plan on 8pm, probably somewhere downtown. If you can post an RSVP in the comments we’ll get a rough estimate of the crowd and will update this post with the exact time/location. Hope to see you!

730PM @ Lucas Park located at 1234 Washington Ave. Just ask for Slicehost.

We’ve been busy at work on a number updates. Along with several efficiency tweaks and small fixes, we have focused on SliceManager security. On Friday we quietly rolled out the new permissions system for the SliceManager, which allows for users to be created in one of three roles: Billing, Systems, or Admin.

Admins can create, modify, and delete users in the SliceManager by navigating to Account > Account Access. We’ve created these roles to be simple and easy-to-use. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Roles Explained

Billing–Allows user to update and modify billing information, add prepayments, and view prior invoices. May see slices from main page, but no other access to slices is granted.

Systems–Allows user to create, update, modify and delete Slices and DNS. Cannot view or modify billing information.

Admin–Unrestricted access; Can do everything in the SliceManager including modification of users and security settings.

It snuck right by us – 2 years ago last week we started taking customers. What a ride! A huge thank you to all of our customers and supporters.

This week we’re excited to add another member to the Slicehost team – Michael Bradley. He has a technology background and recently relocated to the St. Louis area after doing service work in Haiti. Mike will be working with customers via email and chat, mainly on the weekends. Stop in and say hello!

A warm welcome please for our newest Slicehoster – Matthew Sherborne. Matthew has a Linux and Python development background. He was hanging out in SliceChat helping customers when he wrote us wondering if he could get paid for it. After a few phone calls and IM sessions, we had our second international employee and first New Zealander on the team. I’d love to say Matthew’s winning personality and elite technical skills convinced us he was the man for the job, but really we just dig Bret and Jemaine! Stop by and say hello, Matthew’s manning the chatrooms and answering your emails now.

Today we’re pleased to announce a long overdue feature – private IPs for customers with multiple slices. Those of you load-balancing across slices, employing a database cluster/server or syncing between slices will find this option perfect for inter-slice communication. Most importantly, bandwidth on private interfaces will not be metered and therefore does not count toward your per slice transfer limits. We hope this makes life a bit easier for our larger customers using several slices with lots of chatter. Private IPs can be obtained by opening a support issue and there is no charge. We’re looking forward to everyone’s feedback!

A new slicehoster joined our team today – Chris MacGown. He comes from a web and sysadmin background and we are pumped to bring him aboard. Like all of us, he’ll have his hands in everything. You’ll find him in SliceChat and answering emails soon. He’s in STL and brings a crucial vote to the occasional lunchtime standoff between Jason and I (Quizno’s vs. Subway). Stop by soon and give him a shout!

Today we are updating the API with a few features that have been asked for repeatedly. The first feature is the ability to create or rebuild slices from backups.

• API documentation

We have also enabled the ability to destroy slices, but you must enable that ability from the SliceManager, which you may also disable at any time as well.

We've set a user-definable limit of maximum # of slices built in a day, which can be a safeguard against an accidental infinite loop.

Slices also have a number of new attributes:

• Status
• Bandwidth Usage
• All IPs associated
• Progress (when building, rebuilding, etc)

Backward Compatibility

We strive to make each release of the API as backwards-compatible as possible, however there is one small change you may have to make for your Slice models to work.

If you're using Ruby's ActiveResource::Base class, Slices now require an Address class. Since we include one or more IP addresses in an array, ActiveResource requires that it have it's own class. You can simply add on line though:

class Address < String; end

Since the IP addresses are nothing more than strings, this is the easiest way to use them.

It’s been a while since our last podcast! Jason, Paul and I discuss the power maintenance, SliceManager and general updates, the upcoming Slicehost Summit and more. Intro music “In the Beginning” by K’naan, exit music “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. Recorded yesterday afternoon.

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This is a precautionary notification that the local utility company will be working on the community service feed for the STL-B data-center building from July 23 0400 GMT – July 24 0100 GMT). During this window, we will be off utility power and running on generator power. There will be multiple representatives on hand from the utility 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.

UPDATE:

No issues thus far, but they have extended the maintenance window an additional 7 hours with plans to resume usage of the community power feed at July 24 0800 GMT.

UPDATE:

All done. Smooth as silk.