Signing up for Slicehost

I'm starting work on a new website, and I'm downright tired of my old hosting company. Their tools are cumbersome, their plans are undecipherable, and the level of spam email I get from them is reaching impressive levels. I've watched as a variety of people, including the SOTC guys (Red, Tall, and "Fat") have migrated from shared hosting, to dedicated hosting, to even larger dedicated hosting, and it just looks like a miserable high-effort experience to me.

As a result, I've been exploring my options for reliable, affordable web hosting that will grow with my needs, without having to put days of effort into migration and planning every time my needs change. I've heard some great things about the hosting services at Slicehost and I've decided that they are the pretty-much the perfect solution, although they are actually more expensive than my existing shared-hosting provider and don't seem to offer domain registration services.

Each hosting "slice" on Slicehost is a dedicated virtual machine that only you have access to. Slicehost runs multiple virtual machines on each of their hardware machines- However, you are guaranteed a certain about of CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and disk space. As a result, the fact that there are multiple software machines on the same hardware machine won't affect you at all. In fact, it may be of benefit to you, because when your neighboring slices aren't fully using their allocated CPU time, you will be allocated more than your guaranteed minimum allotment of CPU.

I think that Slicehost makes an excellent transition-point from managed hosting towards dedicated hosting; however there is one caveat I must share before moving forward: When you get a slice from Slicehost you get full root access. No restrictions. There won't be anybody around baby-sitting you to make sure you don't screw anything up. However, there will be plenty of facilities provided to help you recover if you do screw up, and there is an amazing amount of support available (email, phone, forums, IRC, ample documentation, and a well-stocked wiki).

Fyi, this article isn't sponsored in any way... I'm just impressed by the services they offer and the rates at which the offer them. I would go into much more detail about them, but you can get a much better overview by visiting their website, and their F.A.Q.s at http://www.slicehost.com/questions/.

Now that all the mouth-flapping, err.. introduction, is over, I'm going to walk through my sign-up process with Slicehost. I really hate not knowing how a website works before I signup with them, so I'm going to include plenty of pictures so you can get an idea of how things work and if this is the right service for you.

When you go to their homepage ( www.slicehost.com) you are immediately presented with a list of their plans, features, and prices. I approve entirely of this- I hate having to dig and dig to find a freaking dollar sign on a website.

First of all, we need to choose the plan that we initially want to go with. Its no big deal if we need more RAM, bandwidth or disk space later- because the service is virtualized, adding more later should be almost push-of-the-button easy. So, I'm just going to start out with the smallest plan "256 slice" - 256 MB of RAM, 10GB disk space, and 100GB of bandwidth, and see how that works out for me.

After you click on the plan you want, you'll be taken to a sign-up page, where you are asked to fill in all the usual billing information. They require that you prepay for 3 months of service with a 10% "bonus" for prepayments of greater than $240 (if you decide not to stay with slicehost, they refund the unused portion).

They probably do this both to discourage fraud and to encourage people to prepay far in advance, which allows slicehost to pay less fess to their credit card processor (many small charges cost more for the company than a few large charges would). It felt a little slimy to me, but I've heard enough good things about them that I decided to allow myself to not only go for the bogus-sounding 3-month prepayment but to go for the whole kibosh and allow myself to be drawn in by the promise of the 10% "bonus" on payments of $240 dollars or more. (BTW, I sent a support email clarifying some of their terms and got a response in about an hour- on a Saturday morning, no less! That gave me a little more confidence in them :P ).

On this page, you also get the opportunity to change your choice of hosting plan, choose a Linux distribution to have your slice pre-loaded with, and to specify the email address of a referral. I put down the email address of my friends at http://rails-o-matic.com/, but you can (hint, hint) put in my email address: elizabrock at gmail.com, or use this referral link.

As soon as you click the "Build my Slices!" button, you'll be brought to the setup screen for "SliceManager", their proprietary virtual machine management environment.

On this screen, they give you the default root password for your slice (Please do change this immediately! I didn't bother to fuz-out my password since I changed it ASAP) and ask you to give them a backup email address and to create a password for slice manager.

After setting all that information, the next thing you're likely to notice about the management console is the tabbed menu that takes up much of the left-hand side of the screen:

There are a lot of interesting things to be found in the menus, but of most interest to me the moment I noticed it was the "slices" tab. I wanted to see my new baby! Err, I mean machine.

Right off the bat, you can see a bunch of information about your slice - I'm sure that it will come in handy eventually, but right now there isn't much of interest here.

If you click on the name of your slice though, you'll be brought to the management section for that slice. Also known as "the portion of Slicehost that is turning Eliza into a quivering knock-kneed fanboy".

The awesome thing about Slicehost/SliceManager, is that you can use it to do any of the management tasks that you would do if the slice was a hardware machine that you had physical access to- i.e. soft reboots, hard reboots, resize/upgrade the hardware, boot into rescue mode (!!!), rebuild the OS, backup the machine [at additional cost :( ] and more. Having, in the past, witnessed the awesome joy of middle-of-the-night trips to the hosting company to get bricked machines back up and running before morning (and resumed heavy web-traffic), I've got to say I'm all about this management suite.

It even includes access to a web-based console:

Based on my experiences thus far, I actually like having a Slice better than having a physical machine! I know that I could setup programs that would provide many of these management facilities, but why should I when I can get them along with this incredibly affordable (and awesome) hosting service? (I'm sorry... that was my inner fanboy sneaking out. Please forgive me.)

P.S. Check back next week for a walk-through of setting up my Gentoo slice for actual use. I suspect that there won't be much actual work to it, given the number of unexpected niceties that Slicehost seems to provide without much to-do.