An upgrade was long overdue. My previous hosts hadn’t updated their offering in line with the times for about 5 years, and were charging far too much for too little. Besides, in their most recent takeover by a bigger corporate (there had been a few in my time with them) the control panel interface went from cool blue to bright red, which is a literal eyesore for an admin interface. Any time I finished with config tasks I found the retained vison of the branded red banner pulsed across my brain. I had to close my eyes for 10 seconds before returning to any work.
So I have recently completed a migration to Slicehost. Here’s what made me choose them:
- I wanted SSH root access to my server. I’ve got used to it now, and don’t want to limit what I can do by Plesk or some other interface. Slicehost let you do what you want with your ‘slice’. It is really a virtual image of your chosen OS. It’s up to you to install and manage everying.
- I can’t afford or justify the cost of a dedicated server, much less need one, so a Virtual Private Server seemed the way to go.
- I have been very happy with the Rackspace service we have been getting for our dedicated server at work. They truly are fanatical about their support. Rackspace don’t directly offer VPS, (they have something called Mosso, which looks like a good scalable option to keep in mind, but still out of my reach in terms of cost), so I searched Google for “Rackspace of VPS hosts”, hoping ‘rackspace’ would be, in IA and search thesaurus speak, an equivalent term to ‘good hosting support’. And I discovered this press release. Slicehost (who I’d never heard of before) were bought by Rackspace in October 2008.
- They start at $20 a month. About half of what I was paying, for a lot lot more capacity (bandwidth, memory, disk space, up-to-date OS…).
So I signed up while sitting listening to talks at Open Hack Day London thinking I might need a decent server to do something interesting for the hack competition, and it was time to do this upgrade I was considering anyway. (I bailed out of the hackathon part of the event in the end – I couldn’t get into the headspace).
Slicehost offer a very bare bones service with minimal administration. You get a ‘slice’ with an IP and you can build or rebuild an image any of the Linux distributions they offer through their manager panel. I rebuilt mine a few times before being happy with it. Various versions of Ubuntu are on offer as well as Debian, Fedora and RHEL. I chose CentOS 5.3 as I am familiar with that – or I thought I was. Over the following week or so setting up the server I got a lot more familiar with CentOS and Linux administration generally.
The distributions are absolute minimal installs. No Apache. No database. No PHP. No mailserver. Just root access. You need to install all this yourself, configure users, set up your IPTables… If you are scared of this kind of stuff or the console interface generally, you will have a hard time with Slicehost. Luckily Slicehost’s support articles are really really good, and you’re sure to learn a few new things just following their instructions. I hit my biggest snags trying to configure a mailserver that supports multiple domains. There was no article for CentOS, only for Ubuntu Hardy, and it seems there is no simple or supported way of setting this up on CentOS. I found a couple tutorials in other places on the web that helped me get the basics running eventually. Finally I had to tweak a few settings in the httpd.conf to get a better performance from PHP and Apache.
Now here I am. Now that I’m set up everything has run smoothly, and I’ve managed to find all the info I need from the articles and forums. So far there’s been no need to test their support – but being a geek I am more inclined to trying to fixing it myself anyway.