Web Hosting Review - Slicehost
By jhuckabee on 05 November 2007
In a previous post I raved about the service and support I receive from RimuHosting and their VPS plans. Their service remains unmatched, but I've been using another hosting provider for some other projects that is also very good.
SliceHost.com has been around for maybe a year now. It was quite the buzz when it came out - and apparently is still since setting up one of their VPS plans requires you to wait for up to several months on a waiting list.
What I like about SliceHost is that everything I normally contact RimuHosting to do for me, I can do myself via SliceHost's admin interface. This mainly involves adding RAM or, since I do a lot of playing around on my slices, reinstalling a clean OS. For instance, yesterday, I wanted a fresh start on my RimuHosting VPS with the latest version of Debian. So, after backing up some databases, I submitted a support ticket and it was done. I'm still hugely impressed that I receive responses from RimuHosting within 5 minutes of me sending an email. And, after I confirmed what I wanted to do, it was another 5 minutes before my VPS was entirely rebuilt.
However, in SliceHosts slice manager, I can go straight to a "rebuild" option, select the distro I want installed, and does this for my automatically.
Also notice some of the other cool options that you have right at your fingertips. The resize option allows you to add/remove RAM at a whim and billing is automatically taken care of.
As for performance, I must say I'm quite impressed. I have two slices at SliceHost. One runs drupal 5.x and the other runs a Ruby on Rails app. Both of these sites are very performant. Granted, neither of these have much traffic, but I have done some load testing and been quited impressed with the results.
The other think I like about SliceHost is the price. With slice's starting at $20 per month, you can't go wrong
One thing that both of these companies do well is maintain a wiki and "HOWTO" section to help you with common sys admin tasks. I commonly refer to both of their help sites for figuring things out when I need a hand. You can find RimuHosting's here and SliceHost's here.
So, if you're not in a huge hurry to get a hosting plan going, sign up on SliceHost's waiting list to see for yourself.
For full disclosure, I am not affiliated with either RimuHosting (rimuhosting.com) or SliceHost (slicehost.com) - I just like their services.
By Sibylle (not verified) on Thu, 04/16/2009 - 20:41
Hi Josh,
I came across you r review of Slicehost, which incidentally mentions Rimu hosting.
Our hosting provider is shutting down, recommending to go with Slicehost (our current provider would handle the move to Slicehost for us). Our own shortlist includes Slicehost, Rimu, AN/midphase and Media Temple.
Your review is a couple of years old...are there any changes to your assessment? Any other thoughts I should consider?
Your input would be highly appreciated.
Sibylle
By jhuckabee on Sat, 05/09/2009 - 16:38
Both services are still great. I've been dealing more with Rimuhosting lately than Slicehost. I will say, Rimuhosting has outstanding customer service. Everytime I've pinged them with a question, they've gotten back to me within an hour or less. They've helped with several dedicated servers and the performance of their hardware/network has been flawless... so far! :-) They're always friendly and great to work with.
One thing I still like about slicehost is their slice management console. If you're going to be adding/removing slices periodically, this is a great tool.
You might also check out http://prgmr.com. Based on Eivind Uggedal's review of their service, this looks like a bare-bones, budget friendly alternative to both Rimuhosting and Slicehost.
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