Slicehost

As of Friday, January 25, the Slice Manager has the ability to display simple diagnostics for your Slices. It will display whether your Slice and/or host server are up, the load on the host server, and the rate of swap usage (reads and writes per second). Additionally, we’ve added links to allow you to use the Just-Ping service to ping your Slice, or your own internet connection, from over 20 points around the world.

Today we’ve enabled a few notifications for Slicehosters. These are sent to the customer email addresses, not the billing email addresses.

Swap

The first notification is about swap usage. We’re monitoring pure I/O on each Slice’s swap partition, and if it exceeds our current threshold (subject to change) you’ll receive an email. This will hopefully let you know that the slice is using more swap than it should. This is bad because using excessive swap will degrade performance dramatically. You have a 3-day threshold to rectify the situation before you are emailed again.

We’ll follow up next week with some ways to tackle swap usage on your slice.

Blocklist

This monitor watches the IPs we provide on 2 Spam Blocklists with more to come soon. The email you receive gives a link to the Blocklist website. There you will find information on how to remove your IP(s) from that list.

Bandwidth Overage

You shall receive this notification the day you go over your bandwidth allotment. There is no change in service, but you will be charged an extra $0.30 (USD) per extra gigabyte of transfer.

Listen up ye RAM starved coders, the 2048slice has arrived. We mentioned the 2gig Slice on last week’s podcast and rolled them out over the weekend. This new package is in response to your demands, which began trickling in early this year and now are regular requests.

What might you do with a 2gig Slice?

• Upgrade your 1024slice and double storage, bandwidth and CPU time
• Use it as a big, bad database server
• Migrate apps from expensive dedicated servers

This will certainly help the 1gig folks who have been pleading for expansion options. And we feel this a real alternative for those running apps on dedicated servers, since you get a big chunk of CPU and RAM at a solid price. Might a 4096slice be around the corner? Hmmm ;)

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.

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?

Scott from hosting-fu compares a VPS to a dedicated server. Several excellent points, our 1024slice was pitted against an entry level dedicated box. A must read for anyone weighing the pros and cons of a VPS or dedicated machine.

Guys, we’re flattered (see here and here) – Slices galore. But you forgot to copy one thing – the prices.

;)

Came across a new, free monitoring service that looks pretty sweet. Montastic is written in Ruby and looks to be a simple service that will solve the needs of most users. Each account gets up to 100 monitorable servers, checked at a minimum of once every 10 minutes. In the event a of failure, an email alert is fired off. Check out the demo video here.

The referrals program is in effect. We decided on using email addresses for the referral code, to be referenced during the signup process. This seemed good because we figured people might not sign-up right away after reading a site or blog post. However, some are now asking for referral codes to pass via URL, so we’ll get started on that too.

Current customers – check the Accounts tab in SliceManager. Have people reference your email address during the sign-up process and after 90days your account will be credited. Enjoy!

Who loves Apple? Then you’ll be interested in the new Xserve. And you might want to let us know because as Apple lovers ourselves, we’re considering Xserve hosting packages.