Slicehost

Credit cards are the only form of payment we accept and occasionally this causes problems for customers (usually international). Paypal is the most often requested alternative and it looks like they have a new solution that could be of interest to our customers. They are set to announce a virtual credit card product tomorrow which generates a usable Mastercard number that deducts directly from your Paypal account. Initial reports describe this as an installed software package that works with your browser, so compatibility with OS X and Linux remains to be seen. However, it could be a great one-time payment option for folks who’d prefer to setup a Slicehost account without using a credit card.

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.

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 ;)

A load of feedback came in on our cashflow post. The majority of comments at the blog and forum are on board with a 3-month prepayment for new signups. Several folks also expressed a desire to pay more to move up in line. Over the weekend, we implemented a new wait list format and signup page which we hope is fair to everyone:

• new signups will require a 3-month prepayment
• if you cancel before the first month, we’ll refund your prepayment minus the first month’s cost. Just like before, the commitment is one month.
• the wait list will be ordered by prepayment term, then signup date. What this means: longer prepayment term = better wait list position.
• Prepayment terms: 3 months (default), 6 months, 12 months, 24 months – 10% bonus for annual prepays
• wait listers receive an email with a link to a status page that includes a time estimate. On this page, you can modify your prepayment term to improve your position (if needed).
• everyone who signed up in March has immediate priority. If you signed up in April, the prepayment term will affect your position.

That covers our new process. The good news: this setup should help everyone get a Slice faster – and that was the goal. Again, we truly appreciate the dialogue on this issue. It gave us an excellent feel for what people would be open to and new thoughts as well. So please do continue, let us know if this works for you.

PS – if you are already on the wait list, you’ll get an email soon with a link. No need to add your name again.

The last time we talked, it was about the wait list. The feedback was awesome and we thank everyone for hanging around to get their hands on a Slice. The list has continued to grow rather quickly, as I’m sure new customers noticed. We’ve been working for several months to address this delay, with limited success. It’s a moving target, both customers and demand continue to grow. We’ve talked extensively with banks/lenders and due to the nature of this business have run into obstacles. At the same time, we’ve explored venture capital. It’s a long cycle and there are strings attached to VC gold :)

We started brainstorming how to hack our cashflow. We love what we do, we love the community growing around our service and we love helping you solve problems with our platform. The wait list is slowing all of that down.

Ideas bounced around:

• raising prices – hate it. We feel our prices should be falling, not rising.
• Slice free market – cool idea that would set an accurate price point. Kind of complex, we want signups and expansion to be simple.
• lifetime accounts – has some pitfalls, such as upgrading Slices. We might suck in 5 years ;)
• selling stock to customers – another neat idea, but lots of legal junk involved.
• setup fees – hell no we won’t go!

One idea with minimal impact to our current scheme: new signups would be billed for 3 months. After that initial period, billing would switch back to monthly. Existing customers would not be affected. In time, the new billing style should help us get ahead of the growing demand curve. We couldn’t have taken this approach last year, given that we were an unknown. Now however, we are proud of our reputation and what our customers say about Slicehost.

We want to solve this problem ASAP. Jason and I have tons of cool stuff planned (new toys later this week), but are increasingly wasting time pursuing financing options. We’d rather be coding.

Current and future customers, please give us your thoughts:

• Does this plan make sense?
• Would it turn you off to our service?
• Other ideas or concerns?

We feel our community is the best asset Slicehost has to offer. Let’s put that brainpower to use and design a plan to fuel its growth.

In speaking with a customer last week, I realized that the wait list might seem mysterious or frustrating for new users. The speculations we’ve heard from folks: our vendor can’t deliver, we’re out of space, not enough man power, going out of business – the list goes on. Well, it’s really nothing dramatic, here’s the scoop.

We’ve been growing super fast since our launch, which is fantastic. And since then, we’ve tried our best to keep up with demand and for the most part have done so. However, hosting is a very capital intensive business. Especially so for us, because our underlying technology prevents overselling. For every person coming on board, there is a Slice deployed and dedicated. Since many of you are business owners yourselves, a word near and dear to your heart is something we manage daily: cashflow. We’re a small, self financed company, purchasing a tremendous amount of expensive hardware, located in expensive data centers. The demand keeps increasing and we simply can’t add the resources fast enough while continuing to service existing customers who are adding Slices and upgrading all the time.

Now I know what you’re thinking: leasing, loans, venture capital, that black American Express card, the lottery. Well all of those options are being explored, some of them more successfully than others. If you have any leads or wealthy relatives, let us know – seriously :) But these are slowwwww processes.

Ultimately it just means that new users probably won’t get a Slice the second they are ready to sign-up. We always have a pool of Slices on hand for existing customers to add and upgrade since they are a priority, but new users have to be throttled as we purchase and deploy new hardware. It’s great that so many folks want to join our community and we’re growing as fast as possible. So please be patient with us, we’ve got the elves working round the clock and UPS dropping servers off weekly . Currently the wait list is about 2 weeks deep and we’ll keep the ETA updated on the reservations page. We hope you can hold out, it’s worth the wait!

One of our most frequent customer requests has been the ability to pay annually or make a one-time payment. It’s really handy for international folks who must approve a charge through the bank, businesses that prefer one-time payments or standard billing cycles, single use credit cards and people with multiple Slices.

What’s in it for you? Payments greater than $250 receive a 10% account bonus. This translates directly into free months or additional services. Customers with several Slices or those who prefer 1 or 2 year prepayments score a nice discount.

We hope this makes life a little easier. You can reach the prepayment page under the Account tab in SliceManager, just select Recent Payments. Let us know if you have any questions.

Sheesh – Slices are flying off the digital shelf. We’ve put new signups on hold until Saturday. Sorry for the delay.

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.

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

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.