Slicehost

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.

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!

Announcing the birth of a new virtual celestial object.

Open for immigration to all Slicehosters. Feel free to submit your feed. Planet Slicehost is the place to read about what Slicehosters are up to, check it out!

edit – updated to reflect Planet software/links. (2007.09.05)

Just turned on a new Slice feature – Rescue mode.

The rescue link, appearing next to your Slices in SliceManager, explains Rescue mode and includes an activation button. It will reboot your Slice into a temporary device running its base OS. A new password will be displayed and you can connect via SSH (same IP). Once in, you can mount your original Slice’s root partition as /dev/sda1.

• to correct a configuration file that is preventing your Slice from booting
• change the filesystem and install an alternate distribution
• repair a corrupt filesystem

• the Rescue Slice has a 1.5 GB filesystem
• Rescue mode can last a maximum of 90 minutes
• Only one Slice per server can be in Rescue mode at a time

This should be a handy feature for those times when you make a configuration mistake and can’t get into your Slice, even after a reboot. Enjoy!

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.

• 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’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!

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).