Slicehost

We have future plans for Debian Etch as a distro choice. But Slicehoster Marko couldn’t wait and installed Debian on his own. This wiki page shows you how he did it. Thanks Marko!

This is awesome.
UPDATE: someone replaced this w/ a horrible image. Apologies if you saw it.

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 propoerly

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.

A server required an emergency reboot just after 12am CST this morning. This was due to a runaway process and an LVM hang that degraded performance. Slices were gracefully shutdown with a downtime of just over 90 seconds. If your Slice was on this machine, you have already been sent notification. Apologies for the trouble and we’ll work to make sure it’s avoided in the future. Please relay any feedback you might have.

Came across a new, free monitoring service that looks pretty sweet. Montastic is written in Ruby and looks to be a simple service that will solve the needs of most users. Each account gets up to 100 monitorable servers, checked at a minimum of once every 10 minutes. In the event a of failure, an email alert is fired off. Check out the demo video 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…