Slicehost

We like creating stuff. We especially like people who create stuff off their own back.

Today we were honoured to present the Rackspace Cloud 'Einstein Award for Innovation' to a member of Slicehost Support for the work he put into creating and maintaining our public chatroom (http://chat.slicehost.com).

As we grew, the chatroom we were using wasn't really working and we needed a new solution. Josh Kearney, who runs our third support shift, volunteered to look into how we can better communicate. He may not have realised the size of the job when he volunteered but he tackled this project head on and much of the development was done in his spare time.

We can't give Josh enough praise for his effort and determination to see the project through the end and he still continues to improve it.

We also like facts and figures so I reckon we can share this with you:

It took Josh something like 80+ hours dedicated to designing and creating the room.

It allows customers to chat with us, live, from any web browser at any time of the day or night.

it allows us to ban those silly people who seem to want to cause havoc and link to nasty websites.

Customers can paste text and images into the room which can assist when explaining an issue.

We hope you like the chatroom. It's been live for a while now and the feedback has been very positive.

Here's to Josh and innovation!

PickledOnion

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

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.

Hook’em Horns! Gig’em Aggies! How ‘bout them Cowboys! Texas forever!

I’ve run out Texas propaganda, but am delighted to announce that slices are live in the Rackspace Dallas datacenter. We’ve been working hard on this since the announcement last October and it’s a big step for us. First, a huge thank you to all of the Rackers who helped turn up the new facility, they’ve been awesome and completely top-notch. Second, we are pumped to offer customers geographically diverse options for backup/redundancy/load-balancing purposes. Third, we have plenty of room to grow in the new facility and are working harder than ever on geeky goodies you are sure to love.

Now what does this mean? Q&A below.

Q. Where are your datacenters?

A. We have 2 facilities in St. Louis (STL-A and STL-B) and now DFW-1.

Q. Where are new customers going?

A. New customer are going to DFW-1, previously they went to STL-B.

Q. Where do slices go when I add them?

A. Additional slices are automatically added to your local/default datacenter.

Q. Can I pick where a new slice is built?

A. Not at the moment. If you’d like to add slices in a datacenter other than your default, just contact support and we’ll do it for you. DFW-1 is a great option for those of you in STL that require geographic diversity for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Q. Can I move existing slices to DFW-1?

A. Not automatically. You’ll need to contact us to build a new slice in DFW-1, then rsync data from the old slice.

Q. Can I create a new slice in DFW-1 from a backup in STL?

A. Not at the moment, but we are working on solutions.

That’s all for now, if you have any other questions please let us know. As always thank you for your support!

The free version of Mike Mayo’s Slicehost iPhone app has finally been approved by Apple and is available now at the App Store. The $1.99 Pro version has been out since late December and allows you manage multiple accounts via the API. There’s been a great response to the app, check it out and let Mike know what you think.

Mike’s post on the free version

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.