Slicehost

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.

FC6 is now an available slice image. We’ve had lots of people ask for different distro’s and FC6 was far and away the most common request. Enjoy.

For those of you with a Treo/Blackberry/smartphone we put together a lite, mobile version of SliceManager. After logging in, you can check stats for your slices or perform a reboot (hard or soft). Hope this helps you roadwarriors out in a time of need. You can access it at m.slicehost.com and will be redirected to the secure site. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

We’re hoping to push out some DNS management features soon. One of the things we found ourselves discussing, is how fancy people want/need to get. This will be a service that should cover 80% of most people’s needs. The other 20% we assume are doing complicated stuff and probably run their own servers or outsource. That being said, we pretty much eliminated some of the typical DNS options such as picking A, CNAME, PTR, MX, NS records. Everything is simple (or so we hope), designate a mail server, set up hosts and aliases. So just looking for some feedback – will this outrage savvy users or is it something you would welcome?

No more wait list, we’ve caught up with the backlog. On another note, several of the regular Campfire chatters are now hanging out in #slicehost on irc.freenode.net, so if it seems a little empty, you might want to check in there. Have a nice weekend everyone!

Scotty over at HostingFu tagged us, so here are 5 things about Slicehost you didn’t know.

1. We became friends at college because we were the only guys double majoring in EE/CS and had all of our classes together.

2. Everything is developed on Macbooks using Textmate.

3. I live across the street from both the NOC and office (downtown STL).

4. We tried to invest in this before starting Slicehost, but couldn’t come up with the funds.

5. Everyday we have a mandatory Ze Frank viewing and celebrate Ride the Fire Eagle Danger Day weekly.

And we tag: Yurii, Tristan, Adrian, Claudio and Daniel – get your 5 things ready guys.

They’re ready! You’ll be getting an email shortly if you signed up via the wait list. If you can’t hold out for that email, stop by the chatroom and ask us for the code (if it’s still in place).

Heads up – emails coming out shortly that will completely cover everyone who has been waiting patiently for a Slice. Sorry for the delay, we had a couple of hardware failures in the new batch and had to do extensive testing to make sure the others were OK. Happy holidays and thanks for your support.

MORE

I wrote this in a hurry, but wanted to share a little more. The servers are installed and running, as is some new network equipment. We’ve made a few backend changes are putting these modifications through their paces. If all goes well, we should be crossing off several customer requests such as extra storage, backup goodies and more in the next few weeks.

It sucks to be sold out. But rest assured, the servers keep coming and we’re working our way through the back order list. The good news: we have our largest server order to date on the books. So if you signed up, it shouldn’t be more than 10 days before you can get your hands on a Slice. Until then – thanks so much for your patience and support.

Ok, so Etch isn’t quite officially final yet, but due to the number of requests for a current 64-bit debian we’ve decided to go ahead and put out the latest version available. Happy Hacking!

We hope to address 2 customer requests with our most recent distribution. First, Debian Sarge – an old and familiar friend. Reliable, trustworthy – ready now for your Slicehosting needs. Second, some people occasionally have trouble with 64-bit compatibility issues, so Sarge is 32-bit. We’ll likely follow this with a 64-bit Etch build after its scheduled release next month. Enjoy!

When we launched Slicehost a few months ago, we knew the weakest part of our plans, when compared to similar products, was bandwidth. Since then, we’ve been working hard to remedy this and today are proud to announce increased limits across the board. The new limits are 100, 200 and 400GB for 256, 512 and 1024 slices respectively. And prices stay the same! A big thank you to our current customers for staying patient while we expanded. Enjoy ;)

Odd problem – some people are locked out of the chatroom while others are able to get in. We’ve confirmed the problem w/ 37signals and they are looking into it. Will update here when it is back up.

UPDATE – chatroom back up.