Slicehost

I’m sure all of you Slicers-to-be have noticed the waitlist estimates growing longer over the past few weeks and we feel your pain. The new customers are pouring in and we’re working hard to get people in the door as fast as possible.

Getting the bad news over with: although you can still add yourself to the waitlist, we are temporarily halting new invitations for slices to people on the list. Why? We’re planning to deploy new backend software and an updated version of SliceManager this week. As all of you know, rolling out a new piece of software is a daunting chore and we’ll be focused on this 100%.

Good news – once completed, the new software and some pending announcements will allows us to accelerate growth and hopefully blow through the waitlist quicker than ever.

Ultimately, we didn’t want to give people false time frames for getting a Slice. Our goal is to get everyone aboard ASAP and all of us are working to get it done. We thank everyone for their patience and holding out for us, the notes of encouragement and enthusiasm really pump us up. We plan to make things even better in the coming months!

We’re pumped to welcome another member to our little team and he’s another well known Slicehoster – SuperJared. With a moniker like that, how could we resist bringing him aboard?

I know what you’re thinking – isn’t he a Django guy? Indeed he is, but he also works with Rails and will be helping out with development. So pop in and say hello, I’m sure you’ll see him around the chatrooms or in support emails.

PS – Radio silence lately, but REST assured we are working hard and hope to make some announcements soon.

Pickled Onion’s been hard at work on a new site that went live today. We’ll be using it as a repository of tutorials and technical articles that are full of details, examples and configurations. It’s a supplemental site to the wiki and will focus on common things you might want to do with your Slices.

There are several articles up now on everything from Subversion to Ubuntu upgrades. Let us know what you think, we’re anxiously waiting for you to submit future article ideas.

We’re very excited to welcome a name that is certainly familiar to those of you who frequent the chatroom, forums or wiki. Or perhaps you’ve used one of his tutorials? PickledOnion (Paul) was someone we thought of when planning to grow our team and he was one of the first people to respond. Given his track record and community endorsements – it was a pretty easy decision.

So everyone give a warm welcome to PO, who will be heading our support and community relations. He’ll continue with his legendary tech how-to’s and assist with our ever expanding list of goodies. Most importantly, his dreamy British accent will make our podcasts sound as suave and sophisticated as ever.

Join today if you are a Facebook regular. The group is called Slicehost.

We started taking customers. What an unbelievable year! Lots of great things planned for the next 12-months too. Most importantly, a big thanks to all of our customers who spread the word and make this community one of the best around.

Anyone interested in a Slicehost Fantasy Football league? Drop by the forum and leave a note.

We discuss our REST refactoring, the waitlist and a few other miscellaneous items. Recorded Friday night.

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It’s super quiet around here. You know what that means right? The wheels are turning, code is being slung and we’re working on goodies. More to come, but until then we wanted to point everyone to our new jobs page. We want sharp, dedicated people in support, operations and development. Sound like you? Then come with us.

Forbes magazine ranks St. Louis #14 on the list of best cities for young professionals. Not a bad place for gobs of virtual servers either ;-)

A very high share of the best 400 big businesses and best 200 small businesses call St. Louis home. In that measure, it ranked sixth. In attracting the cream of the graduate crop, it clocked in at 16th. The never-married population was good for 24th, and salary to cost of living hovers right around the national mean.

A belated congratulations to Slicehosters at Jackson Fish Market whose new service, They’re Beautiful! was both Techcrunched and Scobleized on the same day earlier this week. That’s what I call generating some buzz!

Walter reports:

...our slice had absolutely no problems despite the fact that I haven’t really had a chance to do any perf tuning on it.

Positive reviews too, from both Mike and Robert. Excellent work and a successful launch, congrats to the entire Jackson Fish Market team!

Our friends at Magnetk have put together a nice deal for Slicehost users interested in SftpDrive. It’s a very handy application for Windows that maps an SSH server as a local drive, creating a network filesystem over SFTP. It will work great with your Slice!

Normally priced at $39, using the coupon code SLICEHOST, you can get a copy for $24. The code works for the first 50 users and there are discounted multi-license options too should you need it for a development team. We’re not receiving any kickbacks for this, it’s just a nifty piece of software, is easy to use and enhances your ability to work with Slices. Thanks again to Jeff at Magnetk for setting this up.

Screencast of SftpDrive in action

Listen up ye RAM starved coders, the 2048slice has arrived. We mentioned the 2gig Slice on last week’s podcast and rolled them out over the weekend. This new package is in response to your demands, which began trickling in early this year and now are regular requests.

What might you do with a 2gig Slice?

• Upgrade your 1024slice and double storage, bandwidth and CPU time
• Use it as a big, bad database server
• Migrate apps from expensive dedicated servers

This will certainly help the 1gig folks who have been pleading for expansion options. And we feel this a real alternative for those running apps on dedicated servers, since you get a big chunk of CPU and RAM at a solid price. Might a 4096slice be around the corner? Hmmm ;)

Recorded Friday evening. We discuss an upcoming network maintenance, IP migrations are over, 2 gig slices, the design contest, iphone chatter and REST (briefly).

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