Slicehost

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.

Source

We’re hoping to push out some DNS management features soon. One of the things we found ourselves discussing, is how fancy people want/need to get. This will be a service that should cover 80% of most people’s needs. The other 20% we assume are doing complicated stuff and probably run their own servers or outsource. That being said, we pretty much eliminated some of the typical DNS options such as picking A, CNAME, PTR, MX, NS records. Everything is simple (or so we hope), designate a mail server, set up hosts and aliases. So just looking for some feedback – will this outrage savvy users or is it something you would welcome?

No more wait list, we’ve caught up with the backlog. On another note, several of the regular Campfire chatters are now hanging out in #slicehost on irc.freenode.net, so if it seems a little empty, you might want to check in there. Have a nice weekend everyone!

Topfunky has an awesome screencast (peepcode) showing you how to setup a Rails stack with Capistrano deployment features on an Ubuntu server from an OS X development environment, using the deprec gem. And it’s free. I’m a big fan of the Peepcode screencasts, just a great idea. I look forward to them each month.

Peepcode – Rails stack on Ubuntu using deprec

You might also want to check out Craig Ambrose’s article on using deprec w/ a Slicehost VPS. I haven’t played with deprec much but plan to soon.

Wishing everyone a great 2007!

Happy holidays. Just an update for new users joining via the signup codes. We’ve temporarily suspended new users because of some sporadic problems on the new server batch. Once we solve the problem, we’ll start taking customers again. Discussion thread here.

Scotty over at HostingFu tagged us, so here are 5 things about Slicehost you didn’t know.

1. We became friends at college because we were the only guys double majoring in EE/CS and had all of our classes together.

2. Everything is developed on Macbooks using Textmate.

3. I live across the street from both the NOC and office (downtown STL).

4. We tried to invest in this before starting Slicehost, but couldn’t come up with the funds.

5. Everyday we have a mandatory Ze Frank viewing and celebrate Ride the Fire Eagle Danger Day weekly.

And we tag: Yurii, Tristan, Adrian, Claudio and Daniel – get your 5 things ready guys.

They’re ready! You’ll be getting an email shortly if you signed up via the wait list. If you can’t hold out for that email, stop by the chatroom and ask us for the code (if it’s still in place).