Slicehost, they weren’t lying when they said it was built for developers

We’re just like you. Sick of oversold, underperforming, ancient hosting companies. We took matters into our own hands. We built a hosting company for people who know their stuff. Give us a box, give us bandwidth, give us performance and we get to work. Fast machines, RAID-10 drives, Tier-1 bandwidth and root access. Managed with a customized Xen VPS backend to ensure that your resources are protected and guaranteed.

The Greatest Thing since Sliced Bread!

Just spent a good part of the weekend migrating all my projects to Slicehost. I just want to come out and say that it was truly an enjoyable experience. I don’t particularly enjoy server stuff but the tutorials/articles that they provided just made it so easy.

Another great thing was the unlimited DNS hosting, with an equally kickass dashboard to manage that. The duplicate function is great cause I have many domains with practically the same records. I hate having to keep entering the google gmail servers for the MX records. Duplicate was a godsend.

The pricing was also very competitive, I don’t think I managed to find a better solution. I was also looking at Engine Yard and Heroku. Also the way to scale is simple, just resize your slice. Right now I think thats more than sufficient for my needs.

I basically wanted a simple setup to serve my Rails applications. I was previously on nginx + mongrel clusters which I found had pretty good performance but the nginx configuration file was a monster. I especially didn’t like having to repeat so much code for each new application, although the syntax was nice.

I read about Passenger a while back but as with many things, never got around to actually trying it out. They also offered Rails Enterprise Edition(REE) which was suppose to reduce your memory footprint by 33%! Unbelievable! What can I say I was very skeptical but now I’m a total convert.

Setting up a new slice was a breeze and everything is self-serve, I love instant gratification. Their admin dashboard is excellent, no bullshit just all the stuff you need nothing more nothing less. I picked Ubuntu Hardy. I initially tried Intrepid but REE doesn’t build on it without patching so I’d thought just stick with Hardy. Rebuilding was a breeze too. One thing really great about Slicehost is its articles/community documentation. Pickled Onion has very clear instructions on how to get things done. And even if you run into some problems, someone else would have already posted it in the comments.

I was a bit sad that I’d have to use Apache instead of Nginx as REE only gives the reduced memory when used with Apache according to the website. But after 1 deployment, I was not missing nginx at all. I love how neat and tidy everything is.

Mercurial

Since I was upgrading everything I decided to upgrate from Subversion to Mercurial. It was a tough fight between Git and Mercurial but I decided to give Mercurial a go round as its apparently easier to pick up. Besides migrating to Git would be easier as Git and Mercurial are more similar than svn.

Conclusion

I’m a happy rails camper now! Now off to build some new stuff.