Slicehost

Hot on the heels of the Slicehost iPhone news, Mike Mayo announced Slicehost for Android today. It’s available now at the Android Market, check it out and let us know what you think!

I’m headed to Boston this week for TiECON East. How about a Slicehost meet-up? Wednesday night would be great for a bigger gathering and I’m free Thursday for some one-on-one meetings before I head to the conference. I’ll be staying downtown, so please shoot me an email/tweet (matt@slicehost or @zenmatt) and keep an eye on this post for more details.

Update Meetup on Wednesday, 8pm at Flash’s – 312 Stuart St

Update 2 – We’re moving the location to the Grafton Street Pub & Grill at 1230 Massachusetts Avenue to coincide with a previously scheduled meetup. We’ll be joined by Emil Sayegh, GM of the Rackspace Cloud, who is in town for the MIT CIO Symposium.

Last night we upgraded the software on all of our secondary, internal routers. Tonight, starting around 0300 GMT, we’ll be failing over to the secondary devices and upgrading the primaries. We do not expect any customer impact and the Slicehost/Rackspace NOC will be monitoring the upgrade process. If you experience any networking difficulties, please contact our support team or stop by chat.slicehost.com. Thank you!

We’re making some planned infrastructure changes during the month of May. The first of these changes involve our namerservers: ns1.slicehost.net, ns2.slicehost.net and ns3.slicehost.net. Currently ns1 and ns2 are located in STL-A, ns3 is offsite. Next week, ns1 will move to DFW, ns2 will move to STL-B and ns3 will remain offsite. An outline of what’s taking place next week is below.

DATE: Tuesday May 5

EVENT: We’ll be changing the slicehost.net authoritative DNS records with our registrar.

IMPACT: The only people affected by this event will be those who have hardcoded our nameserver IPs into applications or configuration files (instead of using ns1/ns2/ns3). It’s atypical to hardcode IPs, but we understand people have their reasons. If you did hardcode the IPs, we recommend changing them ASAP to ns1.slicehost.net, ns2.slicehost.net and ns3.slicehost.net.

DATE: Saturday May 9 0400-0430 GMT

EVENT: Backend changes on our DNS application.

IMPACT: During this window, customers using our nameservers will be unable to modify their records.

If you have any questions about the planned events above, please get in touch with our support team. We have another event tentatively scheduled for May 22, a blog post explaining these changes will be posted in a week or so. Thank you!

Emil Sayegh, GM of the Rackspace Cloud (our boss!), joins the podcast during his recent visit to St. Louis. We discuss what’s been going on at Slicehost, mention some upcoming events (Lunch 2.0, Railsconf) and answer a ton of customer tweets and questions. The intro is ‘Sugarfoot’ by Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears, outro is ‘The Mission’ by Puscifer. Enjoy!

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

We’ve had many excuses for missing Railsconf. 2006: “No way we can afford that.” 2007: “No way we can afford that and even if we could we have no time.” 2008: “Holy crap, we totally missed Railsconf.” It ends in 2009, we’re headed to Railsconf! Jason, myself and several members of our development team will be in Las Vegas all week and we’d love to meet up with Slicehosters. Let us know if you’re going and we’ll update everyone on when/where to meet.

UPDATE The plan is to meet at the Pink Taco in the Hard Rock Hotel on Wednesday night. We’ll be there by 6:30. Come say hello and kick it with your fellow Slicehosters.

We’re big fans of Mike Mayo’s Slicehost iPhone App. It’s an awesome tool for controlling slices remotely and in an emergency it can save the day. We met Mike earlier this year in San Francisco and hatched a plan. Since then he’s been doing project work for us and as a result, we’re happy to announce that Slicehost Pro is now free and the Pro version will be the default in future releases. In addition to some tweaks for the upcoming iPhone 3.0 OS, Mike has been working on an Android clone which we hope to release soon (get in touch to test). A big thank you to Mike for all of his hard work. Go get some Slicehosting iPhone goodness – now free.

Any Slicehosters up north? I’m headed to Minneapolis tomorrow for a Cloud Camp at the University of Minnesota on Saturday. If you’re a customer in the area, please get in touch, I’d love to get together!

Today we’re pleased to announce Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an option for Slicehosters! We strive to offer all major distributions and RHEL was a popular request, but it was tricky to implement due to the the virtual nature of slices. Rackspace and Red Hat hammered things out and now you can get RHEL for $36/month plus the cost of your slice. It’s a great solution for deploying applications that support the RHEL stack on your slice and for our business customers that have standardized on the Red Hat platform. We hope this makes life easier for our Red Hat loving Slicehosters, please get in touch with any comments/questions. Enjoy!

Yikes! It’s been way too long since our last podcast. Part of the gang was in San Antonio this week and Paul demanded we knock one out. We cover a bunch of topics, including Cloud Servers, what everyone’s been up to, some customer questions and more. Intro is ‘Here’s the Thing’ by Girl Talk and outro is ‘Ulysses’ by Franz Ferdinand. Enjoy!

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

Welcome Robert Scoble to the Rackspace team! His new project is Building 43, here’s more info on what he’ll be doing. We hope to have Robert talk with some Slicehost customers soon!

You may have noticed this post from our sister company Mosso. The announcement has generated some questions about Slicehost which we want to address.

We promised that Slicehost wouldn’t change after the Rackspace acquisition and that is still 100% true. We continue to offer Slices which include bundled and pooled bandwidth, predictable pricing, great support, a legendary articles database and a lively community.

Cloud Servers is a separate Rackspace product offering that works as a utility service with hourly billing. The pricing does not include bandwidth (a question that keeps coming up). The entry-level support is similar to ours with an option for upgrading to phone support. For more details, check out the Cloud Servers page.

We have a podcast coming out soon and a ton of stuff to discuss. The team is pumped to be with Rackspace and delivering what we always have – Slices with a big dollop of Slicehost Love!

Do pop by our chatroom or email if you have any questions, we’d love to get your feedback.

We’ve been asked every year and can finally say: Yes! Slicehost is going to SXSW! Just a hop, skip and a jump away from Rackspace HQ in San Antonio, we’ll be hanging out at the Interactive portion of the event.

Here’s the lowdown:

- Rackspace will setup shop for the Trade Show at the Convention Center on Saturday, Sunday and Monday (12-6p). We’ll have people onsite answering questions, handing out schwag and most importantly, VIP passes to the party.

- We’ll be demoing at the Accelerator event on Monday at the Downtown Hilton (10a-5p), emceed by blogger extraordinaire Guy Kawasaki.

- We’re all headed to the Rackspace Cloud Party on Monday at Brush Square Park (4p). Food, drink and geekery will abound, so please swing by! Email me to get on the guest list or stop by the Rackspace booth.

Those are the official events, but we all know the best times are the random meetups around town. We’ll be tweeting and would love to hang out with Slicehosters.

Twitter: follow @slicehost or my personal account @zenmatt

Email for the guest list: matt @ slicehost

If you’re headed down, please get in touch. We’re SXSW noobs and could use your tips. See you in Austin!

Wednesday night (March 4), starting around 5:30-6pm at the 21st Amendment. I’ll be there, Lew Moorman from Rackspace and lots of Slicehosters. Join us if you can!

I’m in Seattle for Cloud Camp this Saturday. If you’re attending (sold out), grab me and say hello. Customers/customers-to-be/techies in the neighborhood shoot me a note (matt AT slicehost) or a tweet (@slicehost) and we’ll meet up. From there I’m headed to San Francisco for meetings, the same offer applies!