Slicehost

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.

When we launched Slicehost a few months ago, we knew the weakest part of our plans, when compared to similar products, was bandwidth. Since then, we’ve been working hard to remedy this and today are proud to announce increased limits across the board. The new limits are 100, 200 and 400GB for 256, 512 and 1024 slices respectively. And prices stay the same! A big thank you to our current customers for staying patient while we expanded. Enjoy ;)

Odd problem – some people are locked out of the chatroom while others are able to get in. We’ve confirmed the problem w/ 37signals and they are looking into it. Will update here when it is back up.

UPDATE – chatroom back up.

Details here, all mongrel users should update the gem immediately.

Server adriana is down at the moment, affecting about 16 Slices. If you cannot reach your Slice, this is likely the reason. We’re working hard to get it back up or onto a backup machine. We’ll keep everyone posted.

UPDATE I

Definitely a hardware failure: either CPU or RAM related. We moved all of the drives to another box and everyone is back online. We’ll keep monitoring the situation. Sorry for the outage to those on this server.

UPDATE II

It was a bad RAM module – and our run of poor memory luck continues. Replacement DIMMS on the way and the box will be worked back into production for new customers.

Ajax console access is disabled at the moment. We’re making some changes to the code for security reasons. We’ll update here when it is back online.

UPDATE 10/23 5pm

Console is back up now. Better session handling now in place. Let us know if you have any difficulties.