Slicehost

Lot’s of buzz for the new Mac app ExpanDrive. There’s even a plug on the Textmate blog, where folks have been clamoring for a remote editing solution for as long as I can remember. ExpanDrive allows you to mount SFTP servers in finder, making remote work easier. Gruber says:

For many typical tasks, ExpanDrive is far more convenient and seamless than a standalone client like Interarchy or Transmit. You don’t have to worry about uploading or downloading, it works more like a USB flash drive — you just save and open files directly. If you open remote files checked out of an SVN (or other revision control system) repository, you can use the built-in SVN commands in BBEdit or TextMate, just as though the files were part of a repository checked out on your local drive.

And everyone comments on how fast and easy it is to use. If you’ve been working on your Slices’ apps via SFTP, this could be the tool you’ve been waiting for.

Update – Jeff from Magnetk sends a $5 off coupon for Slicehost customers. It’s good for the first 50 users and lowers the price to $24. Coupon code: ZQCGHPX2LEGFLFI6

Jared just turned on OpenID authentication for SliceManager. It was a popular request and should make life easier for those of you already on the OpenID bandwagon. For those of you who aren’t, here’s an explanation:

For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

We hope you find this useful. As always, let us know if you have questions.

Chris at Summer Daze has created a blog button to show your Slicehosting pride. Check it out here – thanks Chris!

We have two kernels currently deployed: 2.6.18 and 2.6.16.29. 2.6.16 is not vulnerable. If you have 2.6.18, a reboot is required to load the new, patched version. See this forum thread for more details.

As of Friday, January 25, the Slice Manager has the ability to display simple diagnostics for your Slices. It will display whether your Slice and/or host server are up, the load on the host server, and the rate of swap usage (reads and writes per second). Additionally, we’ve added links to allow you to use the Just-Ping service to ping your Slice, or your own internet connection, from over 20 points around the world.

I’m sure everyone and their brother saw these 2 sites last week, given that they were on digg, reddit, delicious and the Hacker News feed at yCombinator. In case your browser was broken and you missed it:

thesixtyone is an awesome new music site allowing users to vote songs onto the front page. They have a great interface for playing songs instantly. Plus the cool VH1 styke pop-ups keep you entertained. James and Samuel survived a massive digg and had a great week of publicity.

Dominiek also hit the front page of digg with his article Building a .com in 24 hours. He walks through the day long process of building Wigitize and people went nuts over the details and new site. There are even updates during and after the traffic wave describing the experience.

Congrats to thesixtyone team and Dominiek!

People have been asking for waitlist updates: surprise, surprise – it’s been non-existent for over a week! We’re happy to be caught up and hope to stay that way. Prepayments remain in place ranging from 3-12 months. Feel free to snag your slice at will and thanks to those who waited patiently during the previous months.

We’re working on lots of little things as we close out 2007:

• Today Arch Linux was added to the list of OS options. We’ve received several requests for Arch and it’s a good choice for power users.
• The mobile version of SliceManager has also been updated, be sure to bookmark it for stats gathering and reboots via the road.
• The bandwidth alerts are now emailed when you hit 80% of your Slice’s limit in order to provide lead time.

Today we’ve enabled a few notifications for Slicehosters. These are sent to the customer email addresses, not the billing email addresses.

Swap

The first notification is about swap usage. We’re monitoring pure I/O on each Slice’s swap partition, and if it exceeds our current threshold (subject to change) you’ll receive an email. This will hopefully let you know that the slice is using more swap than it should. This is bad because using excessive swap will degrade performance dramatically. You have a 3-day threshold to rectify the situation before you are emailed again.

We’ll follow up next week with some ways to tackle swap usage on your slice.

Blocklist

This monitor watches the IPs we provide on 2 Spam Blocklists with more to come soon. The email you receive gives a link to the Blocklist website. There you will find information on how to remove your IP(s) from that list.

Bandwidth Overage

You shall receive this notification the day you go over your bandwidth allotment. There is no change in service, but you will be charged an extra $0.30 (USD) per extra gigabyte of transfer.

We’re through all of the 6, 12 and 24 month prepayments and into the longest outstanding reservations (3-months). Moving at a very quick pace, so if you’re still waiting it will be coming your way soon. If you’re just getting onto the list, 6-month and up should be same day sign-up.

A couple of weeks old, but I wanted to mention SysAdmin’s Chronicles extensive review of Slicehost and the new SliceManager . It covers interacting with a Slice and has several great screenshots. A great article for people considering our services.

Matt Myers has joined Slicehost as our Hardware/NOC guru. He’ll be diving into operational issues such as hardware provisioning, networking and purchasing. Matt lives in St. Louis and will be at the office, so that means Slicehost’s “pants free Fridays” are a thing of the past. Give him a shout in chat or the forums, he goes by SpaceGhost online.

An update to the post yesterday, we realized it’s a hassle for customers to create a new account. Instead, just open a support request with us and we will add the slices for you at another datacenter. SliceManager will handle everything else.

It took a while to get going thanks to some last minute bugs and an edge rails change that bit us, but the new SliceManager is live, as is the revamped backend powering it. We haven’t talked about this rewrite, namely because we’ve been working like dogs to get it out the door. Here are some highlights of the new software and how it affects you.

Slices

• The design of SliceManager has changed – we streamlined the UI for the growing number of customers working with multiple slices for different projects.
• You can add a slice quickly from the front page, previously this was buried under the Account tab.
• Clicking a slice’s name from the master list allows you to work with it.
• The web-based console now supports multiple windows, which was a bug in the previous version.
• The stats page now allows you to retrieve a snapshot of your slice’s performance and review a list of previous stats for comparison.
• Backups won’t look different, but they are under the microscope and we’ll be changing them in the future. Please note, for the next week old daily and weekly are unusable via SliceManager, as they’re being overwritten to be compatible with the new system. We still have them, you can email us if you need one restored. Ditto for snapshots.
• A big user request – you can rename a slice at anytime!
• Reboots and resizes stay the same, but now have progress metrics to show you how far along they are.
• In addition to Rescue mode, you can also reset a slice’s root password should you lock yourself out (that never happens, right?).
• Drumroll please – extra IP’s. They’re $2/month, you’ll need to email us to allocate them and please provide justification.

Adding, removing and resizing Slices

• Adding/upgrading a slice stays the same – you’re billed a prorated amount based on the number of days remaining in your billing cycle.
• Previously removing/downgrading a slice would affect the next billing cycle (you wouldn’t be billed). Now, when you remove/downgrade a Slice, a credit is applied to your account (minus one day). For example, you need a 1GB Slice for a week and you’re halfway through a billing cycle – you’d be charged $35 (half of $70). A week later you’re finished and delete the Slice – you’d receive a credit of ~$17.50. So the most you’re on the hook for at any given time with a new Slice is 1 day. Not quite hourly billing ala EC2 but a step in the right direction ;)

DNS

• We did away with the easy/advanced DNS distinction, since most users preferred the advanced interface. Now there is a dedicated DNS tab where you can handle zones, records and reverse DNS.
• We increased the length of the data field, which should help with DKIM records.
• There is no longer a delay between entering/editing a record and its propagation to our DNS server. We used to sync records between SliceManager and DNS servers, now all of the records are manipulated via a REST API on top of the DNS server.

Help and Support

• We removed the emergency pager, since our monitoring system alerts us of trouble preemptively.
• You can review previous support requests, before contacting us for a new issue.

Account and Billing

• The Email & Password display allows you to edit your login password and email address, which is now separate from the billing email address and information. This should help people who use a corporate card for billing and invoicing, but have a technical person logging in to interact with slices.
• It’s not quite ready yet, but the groundwork has been laid for allowing multiple users to login and interact with slices via SliceManager. We’re still finalizing how granular the access control will be, so keep an eye out for updates on this feature.
• The Payments, Balance and Invoices page also contains a bunch of information designed to simplify billing. At any time you can see your balance, pending charges to your account, the next billing cycle and your current monthly rate.
• Going forward, invoices are saved, so every time your card is charged you’ll receive an email and can review the invoice in SliceManager down the road.
• If you are carrying a positive balance (from a large prepayment), we’ll send you monthly invoices showing what was deducted from your balance each month.

Future

This rewrite is the culmination of a year’s worth of lessons learned, outstanding community feedback and our plans for the company. You can expect APIs, enhanced slice images and multi-user accounts in the coming months, in addition to some news we hope to share with everyone in the next week.

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.