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I’ve used a bunch of other hosting services – mostly for dedicated servers – Liquid Web, Aplus.net, Rackspace, a couple others I can no longer remember. I’ve got a little bit of VPS experience with Liquid Web. Recently I was looking for some cheap hosting and settled on Slicehost, which I guess technically these days is actually Rackspace, but it’s a very different experience (and price!) than going with their parent company.

First up, let me say, I’m very early on in my experience with the company – thus far it’s been quite positive but I haven’t had any crises yet which show a company’s true colors. I don’t doubt that they will crop up – but thus far it’s been smooth sailing.

Initial Sales

So, I had a couple questions early on – mostly about payment (or pre-payment). They don’t have any phone capabilities of any sort – which initially put me off. Sometimes I just like to get on the phone with a guy. They offer email contact but I wanted something more immediate so I jumped into their online chat room. This experience was pretty good, but weird.

The odd bit of it is that it is a public chat room, so everyone is in it asking questions and there’s a guy or two (or three) fielding the questions and doing the work. So, if you have an issue that you’d rather not have open to the world, I’m not sure how they’d deal with it. But assuming your questions are not of a private nature (as mine were) it isn’t an issue. They take your questions and answer them well and pretty quickly. My mind was set to ease and I bought a slice.

The setup

The slice came up like super fast after placing the order online. I went with CentOS, because that’s just how I roll. I am super pleased with the slice – it’s the first place I’ve been to where you get on the server, you run your netstat to see what ports are open and the only port, the only port open is 22. That’s it. How awesome is that? Compare and contrast to my LiquidWeb cpanel VPS which had like a billion ports open, much of which I wasn’t sure if it needed to be open because of cpanel (man that was a big mistake) or not. But even on dedicated servers – there’s typically a half dozen or a dozen ports open out the gate.

This was just the first indicator that when Slicehost says that it’s a service for developers by developers, they mean it – and that’s only good in my book. What I quickly discovered next was that, this was a barebones installation. It had a good yum setup and as I found first to my chagrin and then to my delight that nearly nothing was installed – but they were all only a yum install away – it was great. Your server gets installed with only what you need and use. First I noticed, huh, no Perl. Weird. yum install perl. Nice. Then make and gcc weren’t installed. I mean, that’s when you know you got a minimal install.

Once I got accustomed to this, I really, really appreciated it. The end result is a tight server installed with only what you’re using. I wish more hosts gave you the option to start this way.

The running

I’ve got a couple slices here and both are the cheapest variety the 256 slice. I’m guaranteed at least 256MB of ram and some bit of computing power. Pretty minimal, but for my needs right now they’re fine and for $20/month – I ain’t complaining. The beauty of this is that as my needs grow, I can scale up to larger slices without needing to migrate anything – they just take the slice down, change a config file (or whatever) and bring it up on a bigger one. I’m not sure if they have a migration plan for a dedicated server or not – I’d like to hope that the path to a full on Rackspace install would be smooth, but I haven’t asked yet.

Generally, my access to my slices has been fast. I have noticed some lag time on one or the other at different times. I assume this is when their slicemates get busy (I’m still in dev mode on both, so I know it wasn’t my own caps) – but it was never terribly unusable and given that as a 256 I’m the bottom of the priority battle, I’m not too worried about performance (gosh I hope I don’t regret those words!).

Management tool

Their management tool, is similarly bare bones – it’s no cPanel (thank gods!) – and pretty much all I need. It provides you web access to reboot your machine (all I need to do, 90% of the time – so much better than calling into a company and asking them to do it for you which takes like 30 minutes to an hour). It also gives you web based access to your console (what I need to do the other 10% of the time). So, right there, for most of my needs this is actually better than phone based tech support for my uses.

They also provide full backups of the slice (since it’s an image it’s easy for them to capture full backups – very cool!), which you can grab using their management tool. There’s a lot of good recovery tools in general there, resizing, rescuing (in case you forget your root pw or need to boot into rescue mode). Plus all the stats and diagnostics from having your machine be virtual.

There’s even an iPhone app (or two) for slicehost. It doesn’t, unfortunately, give you the full breadth of functionality. But it does allow you to reboot on the go. It’d be awesome if it somehow provided console access, too. That would be the cat’s meow – maybe they can team up with one of the SSH guys to add this functionality in.

Basically, it’s still early in my days with Slicehost but every indication I’ve gotten so far (with the one exception of the public chat room) has been quite positive. If you’ve got a need for a small VPS, I don’t think there’s any question that this provides a ton of bang for buck. On the other hand, as you get up into larger slices – you start getting into dedicated server pricing and then the value proposition maybe becomes more murky.