Slicehost

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.

We’re through all of the 6, 12 and 24 month prepayments and into the longest outstanding reservations (3-months). Moving at a very quick pace, so if you’re still waiting it will be coming your way soon. If you’re just getting onto the list, 6-month and up should be same day sign-up.

A couple of weeks old, but I wanted to mention SysAdmin’s Chronicles extensive review of Slicehost and the new SliceManager . It covers interacting with a Slice and has several great screenshots. A great article for people considering our services.

Matt Myers has joined Slicehost as our Hardware/NOC guru. He’ll be diving into operational issues such as hardware provisioning, networking and purchasing. Matt lives in St. Louis and will be at the office, so that means Slicehost’s “pants free Fridays” are a thing of the past. Give him a shout in chat or the forums, he goes by SpaceGhost online.

An update to the post yesterday, we realized it’s a hassle for customers to create a new account. Instead, just open a support request with us and we will add the slices for you at another datacenter. SliceManager will handle everything else.

It took a while to get going thanks to some last minute bugs and an edge rails change that bit us, but the new SliceManager is live, as is the revamped backend powering it. We haven’t talked about this rewrite, namely because we’ve been working like dogs to get it out the door. Here are some highlights of the new software and how it affects you.

Slices

• The design of SliceManager has changed – we streamlined the UI for the growing number of customers working with multiple slices for different projects.
• You can add a slice quickly from the front page, previously this was buried under the Account tab.
• Clicking a slice’s name from the master list allows you to work with it.
• The web-based console now supports multiple windows, which was a bug in the previous version.
• The stats page now allows you to retrieve a snapshot of your slice’s performance and review a list of previous stats for comparison.
• Backups won’t look different, but they are under the microscope and we’ll be changing them in the future. Please note, for the next week old daily and weekly are unusable via SliceManager, as they’re being overwritten to be compatible with the new system. We still have them, you can email us if you need one restored. Ditto for snapshots.
• A big user request – you can rename a slice at anytime!
• Reboots and resizes stay the same, but now have progress metrics to show you how far along they are.
• In addition to Rescue mode, you can also reset a slice’s root password should you lock yourself out (that never happens, right?).
• Drumroll please – extra IP’s. They’re $2/month, you’ll need to email us to allocate them and please provide justification.

Adding, removing and resizing Slices

• Adding/upgrading a slice stays the same – you’re billed a prorated amount based on the number of days remaining in your billing cycle.
• Previously removing/downgrading a slice would affect the next billing cycle (you wouldn’t be billed). Now, when you remove/downgrade a Slice, a credit is applied to your account (minus one day). For example, you need a 1GB Slice for a week and you’re halfway through a billing cycle – you’d be charged $35 (half of $70). A week later you’re finished and delete the Slice – you’d receive a credit of ~$17.50. So the most you’re on the hook for at any given time with a new Slice is 1 day. Not quite hourly billing ala EC2 but a step in the right direction ;)

DNS

• We did away with the easy/advanced DNS distinction, since most users preferred the advanced interface. Now there is a dedicated DNS tab where you can handle zones, records and reverse DNS.
• We increased the length of the data field, which should help with DKIM records.
• There is no longer a delay between entering/editing a record and its propagation to our DNS server. We used to sync records between SliceManager and DNS servers, now all of the records are manipulated via a REST API on top of the DNS server.

Help and Support

• We removed the emergency pager, since our monitoring system alerts us of trouble preemptively.
• You can review previous support requests, before contacting us for a new issue.

Account and Billing

• The Email & Password display allows you to edit your login password and email address, which is now separate from the billing email address and information. This should help people who use a corporate card for billing and invoicing, but have a technical person logging in to interact with slices.
• It’s not quite ready yet, but the groundwork has been laid for allowing multiple users to login and interact with slices via SliceManager. We’re still finalizing how granular the access control will be, so keep an eye out for updates on this feature.
• The Payments, Balance and Invoices page also contains a bunch of information designed to simplify billing. At any time you can see your balance, pending charges to your account, the next billing cycle and your current monthly rate.
• Going forward, invoices are saved, so every time your card is charged you’ll receive an email and can review the invoice in SliceManager down the road.
• If you are carrying a positive balance (from a large prepayment), we’ll send you monthly invoices showing what was deducted from your balance each month.

Future

This rewrite is the culmination of a year’s worth of lessons learned, outstanding community feedback and our plans for the company. You can expect APIs, enhanced slice images and multi-user accounts in the coming months, in addition to some news we hope to share with everyone in the next week.

We’re pumped to welcome another member to our little team and he’s another well known Slicehoster – SuperJared. With a moniker like that, how could we resist bringing him aboard?

I know what you’re thinking – isn’t he a Django guy? Indeed he is, but he also works with Rails and will be helping out with development. So pop in and say hello, I’m sure you’ll see him around the chatrooms or in support emails.

PS – Radio silence lately, but REST assured we are working hard and hope to make some announcements soon.

We’re very excited to welcome a name that is certainly familiar to those of you who frequent the chatroom, forums or wiki. Or perhaps you’ve used one of his tutorials? PickledOnion (Paul) was someone we thought of when planning to grow our team and he was one of the first people to respond. Given his track record and community endorsements – it was a pretty easy decision.

So everyone give a warm welcome to PO, who will be heading our support and community relations. He’ll continue with his legendary tech how-to’s and assist with our ever expanding list of goodies. Most importantly, his dreamy British accent will make our podcasts sound as suave and sophisticated as ever.

Join today if you are a Facebook regular. The group is called Slicehost.

We started taking customers. What an unbelievable year! Lots of great things planned for the next 12-months too. Most importantly, a big thanks to all of our customers who spread the word and make this community one of the best around.

A belated congratulations to Slicehosters at Jackson Fish Market whose new service, They’re Beautiful! was both Techcrunched and Scobleized on the same day earlier this week. That’s what I call generating some buzz!

Walter reports:

...our slice had absolutely no problems despite the fact that I haven’t really had a chance to do any perf tuning on it.

Positive reviews too, from both Mike and Robert. Excellent work and a successful launch, congrats to the entire Jackson Fish Market team!

Announcing the birth of a new virtual celestial object.

Open for immigration to all Slicehosters. Feel free to submit your feed. Planet Slicehost is the place to read about what Slicehosters are up to, check it out!

edit – updated to reflect Planet software/links. (2007.09.05)

Just turned on a new Slice feature – Rescue mode.

The rescue link, appearing next to your Slices in SliceManager, explains Rescue mode and includes an activation button. It will reboot your Slice into a temporary device running its base OS. A new password will be displayed and you can connect via SSH (same IP). Once in, you can mount your original Slice’s root partition as /dev/sda1.

• to correct a configuration file that is preventing your Slice from booting
• change the filesystem and install an alternate distribution
• repair a corrupt filesystem

• the Rescue Slice has a 1.5 GB filesystem
• Rescue mode can last a maximum of 90 minutes
• Only one Slice per server can be in Rescue mode at a time

This should be a handy feature for those times when you make a configuration mistake and can’t get into your Slice, even after a reboot. Enjoy!

Technical Nitty Gritty

As scheduled, there was backbone maintenance at our NOC overnight, all went as planned (minor network flaps during the window). Just before the outage, a core router (upstream from us) began to have trouble and ultimately stopped routing. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, everything would fail over to a secondary core router. However the BGP sessions stayed up to both the failover and Verizon from the primary – so the secondary took no action. Bouncing the BGP sessions had no effect. The fix required removing some routes and restarting the device (earlier bounce attempts had failed).

Post Mortem

We cannot apologize enough for this outage – it is simply unacceptable. Jason and I want Slicehost to be an infrastructure for our customers to build upon. Downtime does not factor into that vision. We’re working on changes which we hope will simplify networking, give us more control and improve reliability at the same time. An offsite server to handle communication during an outage will be in place as soon as possible. It was certainly frustrating for those outside of the chatrooms to go for an hour without updates. We’ll let everyone know how to reach this site once it is online.

Slicehost has experienced unbelievable growth and built an amazing community since we launched last year. Our customers have high standards. They demand technical efficiency, transparency and communication. We are devoted to serving this community and meeting its changing needs. Thanks so much for choosing our services, we know you have many options. Please let us know if you have any questions.

PS – We really appreciate the words of encouragement several folks sent our way, having been in similar situations themselves.

• You’ll notice a DNS item on the Slice tab. From here you can manage domains, their records and configure reverse DNS entries.
• If you’re a DNS power user, this first release isn’t for you. It geared for simple setups and only allows for basic record types (A, CNAME, MX). Once we iron out the kinks, we plan on adding an advanced tab covering all of the record types.

Let us know if you have any questions. We hope this helps everyone out. Enjoy!

Update – advanced config options in place.