I’ve been with Slicehost for over a month now and first impressions of the service are very very good. I’ve been impressed with the overall up-time of the service, I’ve had no downtime issues with the websites I host there.  They also provide a few other value added services:

  • Rails based web management console;
  • Wide choice of distro’s (Debian Etch, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch – as of Nov 2008);
  • Lots of how-to docs and tutorials;
  • Community features such as a campfire chatroom, irc, wiki etc…

The community side of things is particularly impressive.  It’s always got someone who can help with any issues you encounter and the guys there really know their stuff.  I can’t recommend this side of the service enough.

At present I pay $38 a month for a slice with 512MB ram, 10GB storage and 100GB bandwidth.  They provide a paid for backup service and I also backup the server via a set of rsync scripts which helps to avoid issues that I’ve encountered in the past.

They were recently acquired by Rackspace, along with JungleDisk in a strategic move to compete with Amazon it would seem.  I sincerely hope this doesn’t change the way the company operates or the service it provides.

Slicehost can be found here: http://www.slicehost.com/