Slicehost

Just turned on a new Slice feature – Rescue mode.

The rescue link, appearing next to your Slices in SliceManager, explains Rescue mode and includes an activation button. It will reboot your Slice into a temporary device running its base OS. A new password will be displayed and you can connect via SSH (same IP). Once in, you can mount your original Slice’s root partition as /dev/sda1.

How might this be used?

• to correct a configuration file that is preventing your Slice from booting
• change the filesystem and install an alternate distribution
• repair a corrupt filesystem

Of note:

• the Rescue Slice has a 1.5 GB filesystem
• Rescue mode can last a maximum of 90 minutes
• Only one Slice per server can be in Rescue mode at a time

This should be a handy feature for those times when you make a configuration mistake and can’t get into your Slice, even after a reboot. Enjoy!

The last time we talked, it was about the wait list. The feedback was awesome and we thank everyone for hanging around to get their hands on a Slice. The list has continued to grow rather quickly, as I’m sure new customers noticed. We’ve been working for several months to address this delay, with limited success. It’s a moving target, both customers and demand continue to grow. We’ve talked extensively with banks/lenders and due to the nature of this business have run into obstacles. At the same time, we’ve explored venture capital. It’s a long cycle and there are strings attached to VC gold :)

We started brainstorming how to hack our cashflow. We love what we do, we love the community growing around our service and we love helping you solve problems with our platform. The wait list is slowing all of that down.

Ideas bounced around:

• raising prices – hate it. We feel our prices should be falling, not rising.
• Slice free market – cool idea that would set an accurate price point. Kind of complex, we want signups and expansion to be simple.
• lifetime accounts – has some pitfalls, such as upgrading Slices. We might suck in 5 years ;)
• selling stock to customers – another neat idea, but lots of legal junk involved.
• setup fees – hell no we won’t go!

One idea with minimal impact to our current scheme: new signups would be billed for 3 months. After that initial period, billing would switch back to monthly. Existing customers would not be affected. In time, the new billing style should help us get ahead of the growing demand curve. We couldn’t have taken this approach last year, given that we were an unknown. Now however, we are proud of our reputation and what our customers say about Slicehost.

We want to solve this problem ASAP. Jason and I have tons of cool stuff planned (new toys later this week), but are increasingly wasting time pursuing financing options. We’d rather be coding.

Current and future customers, please give us your thoughts:

• Does this plan make sense?
• Would it turn you off to our service?
• Other ideas or concerns?

We feel our community is the best asset Slicehost has to offer. Let’s put that brainpower to use and design a plan to fuel its growth.

In speaking with a customer last week, I realized that the wait list might seem mysterious or frustrating for new users. The speculations we’ve heard from folks: our vendor can’t deliver, we’re out of space, not enough man power, going out of business – the list goes on. Well, it’s really nothing dramatic, here’s the scoop.

We’ve been growing super fast since our launch, which is fantastic. And since then, we’ve tried our best to keep up with demand and for the most part have done so. However, hosting is a very capital intensive business. Especially so for us, because our underlying technology prevents overselling. For every person coming on board, there is a Slice deployed and dedicated. Since many of you are business owners yourselves, a word near and dear to your heart is something we manage daily: cashflow. We’re a small, self financed company, purchasing a tremendous amount of expensive hardware, located in expensive data centers. The demand keeps increasing and we simply can’t add the resources fast enough while continuing to service existing customers who are adding Slices and upgrading all the time.

Now I know what you’re thinking: leasing, loans, venture capital, that black American Express card, the lottery. Well all of those options are being explored, some of them more successfully than others. If you have any leads or wealthy relatives, let us know – seriously :) But these are slowwwww processes.

Ultimately it just means that new users probably won’t get a Slice the second they are ready to sign-up. We always have a pool of Slices on hand for existing customers to add and upgrade since they are a priority, but new users have to be throttled as we purchase and deploy new hardware. It’s great that so many folks want to join our community and we’re growing as fast as possible. So please be patient with us, we’ve got the elves working round the clock and UPS dropping servers off weekly . Currently the wait list is about 2 weeks deep and we’ll keep the ETA updated on the reservations page. We hope you can hold out, it’s worth the wait!

We just sent an email to a batch of customers requesting address and phone number updates and did not BCC. It was a misclicked paste, we truly apologize for this, since privacy is one of our personal pet peeves. Please contact us if that has caused you any trouble.

We’ve turned the wait list back on. Next server order arriving at the end of this week. We’ll start notifying people on the list ASAP and in the order of sign-up. There is a reserve for existing customers to add Slices and upgrade.

One of our most frequent customer requests has been the ability to pay annually or make a one-time payment. It’s really handy for international folks who must approve a charge through the bank, businesses that prefer one-time payments or standard billing cycles, single use credit cards and people with multiple Slices.

What’s in it for you? Payments greater than $250 receive a 10% account bonus. This translates directly into free months or additional services. Customers with several Slices or those who prefer 1 or 2 year prepayments score a nice discount.

We hope this makes life a little easier. You can reach the prepayment page under the Account tab in SliceManager, just select Recent Payments. Let us know if you have any questions.

Sheesh – Slices are flying off the digital shelf. We’ve put new signups on hold until Saturday. Sorry for the delay.

From Brian

Photos of tulips in snow
by you and me and whomever else

quicksilver cube
ftff
anakin skywalker “you can try”
“paul ford” sitekit
quicksilver cube
frieze building
slicehost
    slicehost
        slicehost
animal crossing keep trees alive
ann arbor aerial photos
left behind at the fishbowl
brian
the possibility love is not enough

Major apologies everyone – we just got a heads up from our NOC that a core router software upgrade is taking place tonight from 0230-0500 CST. This is NOT how we typically handle maintenance, but this is coming from upstream.

Cisco has been onsite all weekend (tracking down the issue from the problem last Friday) and has determined it is an IOS bug that requires an upgrade. They are focusing on us specifically to ensure availability and minimize downtime by moving us between the core routers, but there still maybe be network outages of approximately 5 minutes.

We are obviously very frustrated with the entire situation. However, this upgrade is for the best and should prevent future problems. We will likely be onsite during the upgrades, so please contact us with any questions. Thanks everyone for your patience.

chat.slicehost.com will redirect you to the Campfire chatroom for updates.

update – I had the GMT conversion incorrect.

Peepcast mastermind and Rails podcaster Topfunky has posted a guide on popular Rails hosting options.

If you are a full-time Rails developer, I think you owe it to yourself to learn how to operate a server. Spending $20/month on your own education will be worthwhile and will help you make mistakes on your own before making them on a paying client project. Slicehost would be a great environment for that kind of self-education.

Slicehoster’s are all over the comments!

Evan:

“A single Rails app or blog” is hardly the limit if you know what you’re doing. I had a Rimuhosting VPS for a while, but Slicehost is much faster.

Ryan:

I’ve found Slicehost to be great. You can ‘reset’ your slice reloading the OS from scratch so you can practice setting up stuff (and then learn to automate it). It has it’s own ajaxy console thing incase you lock yourself out (no need to contact support and wait for them to fix your firewall problems).

Lindsay:

I’ve recently signed up for a Slicehost 256MB plan for all my personal stuff, and so far it’s been great. I’m yet too see how it goes under heavy load though.

Don’t worry about the load Lindsay, it’ll be fine :) We had a couple of diggs this week that ran perfectly.

Keep it up everyone, we really appreciate the endorsements.

My wife is an excellent cook. I can get by if the recipe is detailed enough (how much is a pinch??). Mike Bailey has given us a great deployment and server setup tool in deprec, but it seems that folks still have some problems getting up and running with it. In my opinion the utlimate usefuleness and time savings of deprec and capistrano is worth the initial cost of actually learning how to use it.

Here is a short walk through that hopefully will help highlight the startup process, and also help us keep track of some of the common issues/pitfalls.

Technical Nitty Gritty

As scheduled, there was backbone maintenance at our NOC overnight, all went as planned (minor network flaps during the window). Just before the outage, a core router (upstream from us) began to have trouble and ultimately stopped routing. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, everything would fail over to a secondary core router. However the BGP sessions stayed up to both the failover and Verizon from the primary – so the secondary took no action. Bouncing the BGP sessions had no effect. The fix required removing some routes and restarting the device (earlier bounce attempts had failed).

Post Mortem

We cannot apologize enough for this outage – it is simply unacceptable. Jason and I want Slicehost to be an infrastructure for our customers to build upon. Downtime does not factor into that vision. We’re working on changes which we hope will simplify networking, give us more control and improve reliability at the same time. An offsite server to handle communication during an outage will be in place as soon as possible. It was certainly frustrating for those outside of the chatrooms to go for an hour without updates. We’ll let everyone know how to reach this site once it is online.

Slicehost has experienced unbelievable growth and built an amazing community since we launched last year. Our customers have high standards. They demand technical efficiency, transparency and communication. We are devoted to serving this community and meeting its changing needs. Thanks so much for choosing our services, we know you have many options. Please let us know if you have any questions.

PS – We really appreciate the words of encouragement several folks sent our way, having been in similar situations themselves.

Our sincerest apologies for the network otuage this afternoon (1130-1230CST). A full report will follow here and the the forums. Also some clarification – this was just network related, Slices were fine.

If you need a Company/Organization name on your invoices for tax purposes, you can add this information in the Account tab of SliceManager. Hope this helps with the bookkeeping, let us know if anything else would make life easier.

SuperJared has performed some http benchmarking on a 1gig Slice. Check out the results if you’re considering Lighttpd or Nginx instead of Apache.