Slicehost

From Brian

Photos of tulips in snow
by you and me and whomever else

quicksilver cube
ftff
anakin skywalker “you can try”
“paul ford” sitekit
quicksilver cube
frieze building
slicehost
    slicehost
        slicehost
animal crossing keep trees alive
ann arbor aerial photos
left behind at the fishbowl
brian
the possibility love is not enough

Major apologies everyone – we just got a heads up from our NOC that a core router software upgrade is taking place tonight from 0230-0500 CST. This is NOT how we typically handle maintenance, but this is coming from upstream.

Cisco has been onsite all weekend (tracking down the issue from the problem last Friday) and has determined it is an IOS bug that requires an upgrade. They are focusing on us specifically to ensure availability and minimize downtime by moving us between the core routers, but there still maybe be network outages of approximately 5 minutes.

We are obviously very frustrated with the entire situation. However, this upgrade is for the best and should prevent future problems. We will likely be onsite during the upgrades, so please contact us with any questions. Thanks everyone for your patience.

chat.slicehost.com will redirect you to the Campfire chatroom for updates.

update – I had the GMT conversion incorrect.

Peepcast mastermind and Rails podcaster Topfunky has posted a guide on popular Rails hosting options.

If you are a full-time Rails developer, I think you owe it to yourself to learn how to operate a server. Spending $20/month on your own education will be worthwhile and will help you make mistakes on your own before making them on a paying client project. Slicehost would be a great environment for that kind of self-education.

Slicehoster’s are all over the comments!

Evan:

“A single Rails app or blog” is hardly the limit if you know what you’re doing. I had a Rimuhosting VPS for a while, but Slicehost is much faster.

Ryan:

I’ve found Slicehost to be great. You can ‘reset’ your slice reloading the OS from scratch so you can practice setting up stuff (and then learn to automate it). It has it’s own ajaxy console thing incase you lock yourself out (no need to contact support and wait for them to fix your firewall problems).

Lindsay:

I’ve recently signed up for a Slicehost 256MB plan for all my personal stuff, and so far it’s been great. I’m yet too see how it goes under heavy load though.

Don’t worry about the load Lindsay, it’ll be fine :) We had a couple of diggs this week that ran perfectly.

Keep it up everyone, we really appreciate the endorsements.

My wife is an excellent cook. I can get by if the recipe is detailed enough (how much is a pinch??). Mike Bailey has given us a great deployment and server setup tool in deprec, but it seems that folks still have some problems getting up and running with it. In my opinion the utlimate usefuleness and time savings of deprec and capistrano is worth the initial cost of actually learning how to use it.

Here is a short walk through that hopefully will help highlight the startup process, and also help us keep track of some of the common issues/pitfalls.

Technical Nitty Gritty

As scheduled, there was backbone maintenance at our NOC overnight, all went as planned (minor network flaps during the window). Just before the outage, a core router (upstream from us) began to have trouble and ultimately stopped routing. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, everything would fail over to a secondary core router. However the BGP sessions stayed up to both the failover and Verizon from the primary – so the secondary took no action. Bouncing the BGP sessions had no effect. The fix required removing some routes and restarting the device (earlier bounce attempts had failed).

Post Mortem

We cannot apologize enough for this outage – it is simply unacceptable. Jason and I want Slicehost to be an infrastructure for our customers to build upon. Downtime does not factor into that vision. We’re working on changes which we hope will simplify networking, give us more control and improve reliability at the same time. An offsite server to handle communication during an outage will be in place as soon as possible. It was certainly frustrating for those outside of the chatrooms to go for an hour without updates. We’ll let everyone know how to reach this site once it is online.

Slicehost has experienced unbelievable growth and built an amazing community since we launched last year. Our customers have high standards. They demand technical efficiency, transparency and communication. We are devoted to serving this community and meeting its changing needs. Thanks so much for choosing our services, we know you have many options. Please let us know if you have any questions.

PS – We really appreciate the words of encouragement several folks sent our way, having been in similar situations themselves.

Our sincerest apologies for the network otuage this afternoon (1130-1230CST). A full report will follow here and the the forums. Also some clarification – this was just network related, Slices were fine.

If you need a Company/Organization name on your invoices for tax purposes, you can add this information in the Account tab of SliceManager. Hope this helps with the bookkeeping, let us know if anything else would make life easier.

SuperJared has performed some http benchmarking on a 1gig Slice. Check out the results if you’re considering Lighttpd or Nginx instead of Apache.

Friday Feb 16 0700-1100 GMT

Upstream Network Maintenance

Impact: a few brief network blips lasting approximately 3 minutes. Please contact us with any questions.

One of our early customers is posting about decisions and lessons learned while running their startup – ProductCritic. The first post talks about choosing a VPS over a dedicated server.

But one of the greatest reasons to use a VPS is because it allows you to grow your hardware needs as your site grows. Instead of investing thousands into your own dedicated server and that is basically just going to sit idle 99% of the time you rent a slice of the size needed for your site. This is less expensive, more flexible and very cost effective. Zero upfront costs and very low monthly costs.

Link

A long overdue feature – DNS management. Thanks to everyone for their patience while we worked on this. Onto the nitty gritty:

• You’ll notice a DNS item on the Slice tab. From here you can manage domains, their records and configure reverse DNS entries.
• If you’re a DNS power user, this first release isn’t for you. It geared for simple setups and only allows for basic record types (A, CNAME, MX). Once we iron out the kinks, we plan on adding an advanced tab covering all of the record types.

Let us know if you have any questions. We hope this helps everyone out. Enjoy!

Update – advanced config options in place.

FC6 is now an available slice image. We’ve had lots of people ask for different distro’s and FC6 was far and away the most common request. Enjoy.

For those of you with a Treo/Blackberry/smartphone we put together a lite, mobile version of SliceManager. After logging in, you can check stats for your slices or perform a reboot (hard or soft). Hope this helps you roadwarriors out in a time of need. You can access it at m.slicehost.com and will be redirected to the secure site. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

We’ve been knocking out a few things on our todo list. Some items of interest:

• our email invoice templates are formatted better to assist businesses with tax documentation
• the Account page in SliceManager now displays upcoming maintenance events for each of your Slices. This should help all of the multi-slice owners who had a hard time telling which Slice was affected.
• we implemented an affiliate linking system as an alternative to giving out your email address. Check out the Referrals page under the Account tab to get your link and code. Sorry this one took so long!

First round of DNS management features coming soon.