Slicehost

We sold out over the weekend due to a shipping snafu. New servers are now in place and we’re taking Slices and upgrades once again.

Apologies to anyone looking to buy a 512 or 1024 slice at the moment. We had an order of new servers coming in Friday, all scheduled for deployment this weekend. The shipping got delayed, so sadly you’ll have to wait until Monday afternoon. Email if you’d like to reserve space on the new boxes.

UPDATE: sold out of everything at the moment, we’re building the new servers as we speak and they’ll be at the NOC later today. Sorry for the delay.

UPDATE 2: open for business, servers installed and more on the way.

Data Center Knowledge links to a couple of interesting articles on rising NOC costs. Increased power requirements for equipment and cooling are driving space costs through the roof. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly bigger companies explore virtual computing alternatives. If you’re interested in discussing Slice clusters for your company, please let us know.

Scott from hosting-fu compares a VPS to a dedicated server. Several excellent points, our 1024slice was pitted against an entry level dedicated box. A must read for anyone weighing the pros and cons of a VPS or dedicated machine.

Say what you will about Dave Winer, but the man has jump started mobile content. It’s not as if he invented the concept, but the industry was just… stagnant. He released his tools, which I find useful, and suddenly – mobile versions of every feed in my list are popping up.

That being said, one of the ideas we had on our to-do list, was a mobile version of SliceManager. Something you could access comfortably via your blackberry/treo/cell, possibly w/ some SMS features. Would such a thing be useful? Perhaps the ability to see uptime, stats and maybe even reboot? Let us know.

A great looking tool for performance monitoring, the Mysql Query Analyzer plugin can help you find bottlenecks. Very handy for troubleshooting DB performance on your Slice.

script/plugin install http://svn.nfectio.us/plugins/query_analyzer

Guys, we’re flattered (see here and here) – Slices galore. But you forgot to copy one thing – the prices.

;)

We’ve had a few customers inquire about bulk Slice purchases for various reasons including: classroom use, virtual infrastructure, load balancing and more. These are all great ideas. For businesses, considering a cluster of Slices for server consolidation makes even more sense. Check out this stat:

We estimate conservatively that for every workload moved from a physical to virtual environment, customers can save about $290 in electricity costs, and about $360 a year in cooling costs. The more important thing is that these savings accrue year after year.

Wow! Let us know if you’re interested in a bulk purchase and we can put something together for you. With skyrocketing cooling and data center costs, there’s never been a better time to consider virtual server consolidation.

Celebrate good times. You speak, we listen, cool stuff happens. A major customer request was console access. Now why would you need console access when you have SSH?

Several reasons:

• you might accidentally lock yourself out via firewall (never happens right?)
• SSH can fail
• you misconfigure a server and it can’t boot properly

Previously, you had to open a support issue to get this resolved. No longer! Just login to SliceManger, click the [console] link next to your Slice name and let the magic happen.

Pretty wicked eh? This shouldn’t replace SSH as your remote access method, even though it is encrypted over HTTPS. The console is mainly for emergency use or a quick check in when you only have browser access. But we’re certain it will make your life easier someday and that’s what we like to do.

Now who can you thank for such coolness? Jason of course. He forced Ruby, Rails and Python (ajaxterm) into the same room, then convinced them to play nicely. Too smart for his own good that guy. Pop into the chatroom and let us know what you think. As always thanks for your input – it’s how we make things better around here.

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!