Slicehost

Paul pointed out this morning that several people have joined the Slicehost team and we hadn’t done the customary blog post. We did mention everyone in our video chat last week, if you missed it please give a warm welcome to:

Josh K from Wisconsin who will be working overnight support. Josh has a background in Linux administration.

Ben B from North Carolina working daytime support. Ben previously worked in software QA and Linux administration.

Ben H from Chicago working daytime support. Ben comes from a development and administration background.

Josh and the two Bens were Slicehost customers before joining and have really improved our support coverage.

We also picked up two people from Rackspace:

Mark B in San Antonio working overnight support has been with us since October. He’s been a fantastic help through this process and hit the ground running.

Sabrina G who recently moved from Texas to St Louis and has been assisting with operations. Everyone at Rackspace referred to her as a “superstar” and she’s lived up to that reputation.

They’ve been here a month or longer, but if you missed them stop by the chatroom and say hello. We’re growing fast and having fun – if you’re located in St Louis and interested in joining us, get in touch!

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

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.

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

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!

The blog has been a little quiet as of late, but we've been busy working on several updates.

CentOS Updated

CentOS was recently updated to version 5.2, now available for new Slices and rebuilds. (If you want to upgrade an existing CentOS installation you'll have to do so using the standard CentOS upgrade path.)

Newer Kernels

We have added support for newer 2.6.24 derived kernels. Currently all new slices are built with these kernels, if you'd like to update any existing slice, let us know via a support request.

SliceManager Security Updates

We've been hard at work on the SliceManager, fixing bugs and adding features. Community feedback has been an invaluable resource, notably in a recent discussion in the SliceForum regarding SliceManager security. We have several options on the table, most of which are still under discussion, but we decided to push out a couple of simple ones right away:

• Notify me on SliceManager login failures
• Send Slice root password via email

These can be found under Accounts > Security Preferences. Additionally, we now only allow up to 3 login failures in 30 minutes, significantly reducing the possibility of a brute force break-in to your SliceManager account.

Several updates and features are on the horizon, so stay tuned. If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment, forum post, email, or drop by our chat.

Lukas Biewald has an awesome post up on his rather adventurous weekend. He woke up Sunday morning to find his site, Facestat, on the front page of Yahoo picked up from an earlier link in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ve been hit by Digg and Slashdot before, but this spike in traffic was like nothing I’d ever seen.

He goes on to explain how the Facestat team handled the situation and the frantic day spent readying more servers. We spoke with them Sunday evening as they were working. Our hats are off to them, excellent job handling a huge traffic wave and lots of pressure.

Slicehost has scaled up as fast as we’ve needed them to.

Link

Slicehost's 2 year anniversary is approaching and it's been a wild ride. We are proud of how much we've grown and the incredible community that has sprung up around our service. Recently we passed the 10,000 slice milestone and decided to use the opportunity to share some interesting metrics.

High level stats

Active Slices >10,000
Raw Storage >600TB
Active Customers >8,500
60% US, 40% International from 92 countries
16,500 domains hosted

SliceManager stats (last 6 months):

12,190 Slice rebuilds
293,370 Slice backups taken
2,697 Slice resizes performed
1,088 Slice root password resets
3,202 Support tickets answered
14,994 SliceManager requested reboots

Community stats:

Facebook group >500 members
Freenode IRC channel 2,239 unique nicks since inception
23,000 unique visitors per month to articles.slicehost.com
155,000 page views per month at articles.slicehost.com
11,140 forum comments
828 twitter followers

Paul prepared the 8.04 LTS (Hardy) images last night. If you’ve been waiting for the latest version of Ubuntu, it’s available now for new slices and rebuilds. Enjoy!