Slicehost Review - Initial Impressions
I Decided back in the Summer that I would ditch Servage when my renewal came around in the Autumn, I’ll discuss why in a separate updated final review. In short I wanted a system I had as near to 100% control over as possible, so that meant a VPS. Hosting my own and my family’s sites at work was an option, but I think that where possible this should be avoided, especially where blogs and off colour humour are concerned!
Slicehost are an American VPS provider currently in vogue with the Rails and Wordpress Self Hosted and Development communities (amongst others). Their service is “built for developers” and the basic intended customer is one who holds the ethos “Give us a box, give us bandwidth, give us performance and we get to work” (their words).
Signup is straightforward, with your instance or “slice” being generated almost immediately. You can choose to not have the root password sent by email which is a positive sign. I must have made a mistake somewhere along the line and ended up with an Ubuntu slice, however regenerating this into the latest CentOS I wanted took no more than a few minutes at no additional cost.
Prices are none too shabby for what you get, at current exchange rates the $20 per month charge for the “256MB memory / 10GB Disk / 100GB transfer” slice works out just under £11 per month, which compares favourably with a high spec quality shared hosting account. A three month pre-payment is required, however this is still better than those providers who advertise a monthly cost and then charge annually. The terms of service and acceptable usage policies appear straightforward and don’t immediately appear to contain any nasty surprises (such as no IRC).
The control panel does not appear overloaded with features, but contains quite a bit once you get down into it and does what is required of it well. DNS can be configured quickly and easliy, with the ability to clone zones which is handy if you’re moving in a number of domains. The provision of DNS services additional to the slice itself is most welcome for those on the 256MB offering who do not have their DNS elsewhere, as not running bind will save some precious memory.Other welcome extras are the ability to define additional control panel users (for billing roles etc) and to be notified by email of failed login attempts. There is also API access and a referral URL provided, which will be handy for the large professional customer and individual enthusiast respectively.
A web based server console (over https) is also available which is very welcome, as are tools to reset the root password, boot into a rescue mode should you totally hose things and the ability to upgrade your slice. The upgrade process promised (untested by myself at this point) is seamless and involves the generation of a new slice, when this is complete your original slice is brought down and your data is copied in, once this has been done the new instance will boot and everything can resume as before.
Backups are available at a cost of $5.00 per month for the 256MB Slice, which is a negligible cost for piece of mind / when performing a major upgrade in the grand scheme of things, but does still represent a quarter of the monthly charge for the most basic slice.
The company appear to encourage a developer / admin community around forums, wiki and their IRC channel as well as publishing their own how to articles. There are a good number of these available which will help the first time server administrator get up to speed (and no doubt reduces the number of support tickets they receive regarding things they aren’t actually responsible for 
).
Latency appears to be good, given that their service operates in the states and I operate from the South of England. Those based in the UK who store customer data on their sites / databases may need to be aware of data protection legislation regarding the transfer of data to other countries. There are unfortunately no immediate plans to provide a European data centre.
There are various nice technical touches, such as private IPs for people with multiple slices, who also get the benefit of bandwidth pooling, very handy in a clustered setup where one instance such as the web server may require a vastly different amount of bandwidth to it’s companions. Additional IPs are two dollars each and additional bandwidth is .30 per GB.
The SLA offered (i.e none) may surprise some (despite the fact that for the price, it really shouldn’t) the attitude to this in the FAQ is however sensible
“…most hosting SLA agreements are just plain silly. They promise things like 99.9% uptime, but downtime excludes: scheduled maintenance, network outages, hardware failures and software trouble. Well what exactly is left to cause downtime? Here’s our SLA: we’ll do our best to keep your machines running smoothly for as long as possible and get them up ASAP should something go wrong”
It isn’t after all that difficult to achieve a ninety something percentage uptime over a year whilst still having quite striking downtime (from a customer’s perspective). If you need reimbursement every time your service goes down, you’ll likely need a custom SLA contract with your provider. It never ceases to amaze me the number of people paying peanuts per year (in terms of the cost of hardware, rack space and technical staff) who think they’ll be entitled to compensation if something goes down.
In the 22 days since I purchased my slice it has not had reliability or connectivity issues. I have had no need as yet to call on support, so cannot comment on this important aspect. I will add however that staff members do regularly pop up in IRC and seem happy to answer questions, even occasionally on things outside their remit.
At this point I have no hesitation in recommending Slicehost if you require a VPS. I’ll update this post with any further thoughts or if anything untoward should occur. I’ve purposefully left out specific details of what I did with my Slice (apart from the rather obvious fact that you’re looking at it) as my needs of hosting a small number of websites are quite possibly markedly different from your own.
If this post has been helpful you can purchase using my referral code here. This will be removed should I cease to recommend Slicehost for VPS, or if I hear many negative experiences from other users through the comments below.
Rowan :: Sep.29.2008 :: Choosing a Host, Linux, Reviews, VPS, Web Hosting :: 1 Comment »