Slicehost

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!

The Slicehost API is an interface to Slicehost services, allowing users to automate tasks as needed. Please note that the current iteration allows access to DNS only. This will change in the future as we add access to more services.

To use the API, you must have a Slicehost account. You may enable or disable API access from this account, and you may re-generate your API password as you see fit. You can find this option in the SliceManager on the API page under the Accounts tab. This API follows a standard ActiveResource pattern as seen in Ruby on Rails.

Resources

• Slicehost API Reference (PDF)
• ActiveResource README
• PyActiveResource

The original Slicehost site was a product of our elite design skills. Has everyone stopped laughing yet? We’re grateful that our customers focused more on the message and less on the look. Alas, it was time to retire the old site and bring in the professionals. Steve Smith of Ordered List, a long time Slicehoster, was up to the task. He created a great new design for the site that stays true to the original and does not look like it was made by a ten year old with a CSS book on christmas morning. Months later that still stings Michael :)

Everything, including old links, should be working. Just in case the blog is now at www.slicehost.com/blog and the feed is here. We hope you like the new style. Please let us know what you think!

Has that 2048slice been cramping your style? Today 4096slices are available to everyone for resizes and new slices. That’s 4GB of RAM, 160GB of storage and 1600GB of bandwidth for your computing pleasure. 8GB here we come…

A few weeks ago, we received an email from Stephen Spector of Citrix. He’s the Community Manager for Xen.org and wanted a site for the Xen blog. He knew we were proponents of Xen and after a brief chat the blog was up and running. We’re honored to have the site at Slicehost and grateful for the work that goes into the Xen.org project. If you’re looking for updates and news on the virtualization software that powers your slice, blog.xen.org is the place to go.

We’re pleased to have Tony Dolan joining us starting today. Tony lives in St. Louis and came highly recommended via a mutual friend of ours. He has a background in managed hosting and has worked extensively with J2EE deployments using Tomcat and Resin. He’ll be assisting with systems administration, hardware management and customer support. Stop by the chatroom and give him the standard hazing.

Slicehost was mentioned in an interview with Dmitriy Samovskiy at High Scalability. Dmitriy discusses an article he wrote for Linux Journal, Building a Multisourced Infrastructure Using OpenVPN. He proposes using OpenVPN to connect servers in multiple datacenters to minimize downtime and risk. It’s an interesting read for customers looking to ensure availability and pertinent for people running slices in both of our datacenters.

Jeff from Magnetk sends a $5 off coupon for ExpanDrive, lowering the price to $24. Great tool for Mac users working on their slices.

Coupon code: ZQCGHPX2LEGFLFI6

It’s good for 50 users. Thanks Jeff!

Lot’s of buzz for the new Mac app ExpanDrive. There’s even a plug on the Textmate blog, where folks have been clamoring for a remote editing solution for as long as I can remember. ExpanDrive allows you to mount SFTP servers in finder, making remote work easier. Gruber says:

For many typical tasks, ExpanDrive is far more convenient and seamless than a standalone client like Interarchy or Transmit. You don’t have to worry about uploading or downloading, it works more like a USB flash drive — you just save and open files directly. If you open remote files checked out of an SVN (or other revision control system) repository, you can use the built-in SVN commands in BBEdit or TextMate, just as though the files were part of a repository checked out on your local drive.

And everyone comments on how fast and easy it is to use. If you’ve been working on your Slices’ apps via SFTP, this could be the tool you’ve been waiting for.

Update – Jeff from Magnetk sends a $5 off coupon for Slicehost customers. It’s good for the first 50 users and lowers the price to $24. Coupon code: ZQCGHPX2LEGFLFI6

Jared just turned on OpenID authentication for SliceManager. It was a popular request and should make life easier for those of you already on the OpenID bandwagon. For those of you who aren’t, here’s an explanation:

For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

We hope you find this useful. As always, let us know if you have questions.