Slicehost

We’ve picked up several new customers this week who were migrating from trouble at other providers. Everyone has outages, so we wish those guys a speedy recovery. But downtime is the fastest way to lose customers and that’s the nature of this game. So our question to the new folks and people still considering us: what can/should we be doing better? What did your previous hosting companies do good/bad? Please let us know – we’re listening!

Scott from HostingFu has posted a great review of our product. Thanks Scott, for taking the time to put together a thoughtful and informative post for the VPS community. And regarding the console access – we have something up our sleeve ;) . More to come…

By popular demand, Gentoo 2006.1 is now available as a distribution choice. One warning, if you’re rebuilding/adding/creating a Slice, it does take longer than the others (about 90 seconds) to create – so please be patient. Next – we’ll be working on OpenBSD, which after Gentoo is a popular request.

Every Slicehoster can appreciate this.

Random updates for Slicehosters:

• We’re working on taking control of our Reverse DNS. Currently we have to go upstream for requests which is taking a bit longer than we hoped. The process should be fixed this week (at least we hope).

• We’re working on allowing customers to purchse extra IP’s or storage space.

• The forums now support RSS/Atom feeds.

The referrals program is in effect. We decided on using email addresses for the referral code, to be referenced during the signup process. This seemed good because we figured people might not sign-up right away after reading a site or blog post. However, some are now asking for referral codes to pass via URL, so we’ll get started on that too.

Current customers – check the Accounts tab in SliceManager. Have people reference your email address during the sign-up process and after 90days your account will be credited. Enjoy!

Hurray – we have opened the doors! A big thanks to all of our early testers. Please contact us with any questions – we’re here for you. Enjoy.

A lot of new customers are asking how much longer. Soon!. We made some network changes this weekend to accomodate the increased demand and are polishing off the management interface. This short delay will be worth it in the long run for everyone in terms of performance. And a big thank you to our beta customers for putting up with the quirks.

We’re almost ready – a new batch of machines arrives today! In the meantime, here are a few quick snapshots of the management interface, which a people have been asking for.

Perform a reboot:

Or send us a message – we hate tickets too:

Who loves Apple? Then you’ll be interested in the new Xserve. And you might want to let us know because as Apple lovers ourselves, we’re considering Xserve hosting packages.

Thanks to 37signals, the chartroom is backup. In a geeky brush with fame, I received an email from Jason (the owner) and a comment from the man himself – DHH. We bought their book, we use all of their products and are all aboard with working smarter, not harder. However, the fact that both of these guys were working customer support on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and evening speaks volumes about their success. Thanks guys!

It appears that 37signals’ scheduled maintenance on the Campfire chat application has broken a few things. We had to flush our DNS cache this morning and it took a few hours for us to login. But now the public chatroom seems to be unaccessible. The URLs it generates for us link to error pages. Hopefully they’ll get it back up soon and we’ll see you there.