How do you know that a web hosting company is good? You do a Google Search, landed on an initial impression review written almost 12 months ago, search around the site for any hint of negative comments on that hosting company and find none, and 12 months later the site is still hosted there.
Yes, I am talking about SliceHost here, and they are that good.
I logged into my SliceManager last week and saw that my slice has been active for 358 days already — that is one week short of a full year! At the end of my previous review, which was written just a few days after I signed up with them, I promised that I will come back and report how they are in 3 months time. Little do I know that when you have a smooth service, time just flies.
I think almost every positive point that I came up with 12 months ago are still true today. They remain a non-overseller — they have increased the monthly data transfer once last November, but still far from many crazy VPS oversellers out there. They are definitely very developer-friendly — you get lots of support on their forum, wiki and article repository which recently came live. The 64-bit hardware and OS is great. The performance is unreal and I have never had any CPU nor IO related performance issues. Moreover since I upgraded to 512MB slice, I have also been moved from dual Opteron 265 to dual Opteron 2212 HE, i.e. even faster :)
The only thing that is no longer true is fast Xen provisioning. Due to their popularity, there is just no way to grab a slice 5 minutes after you sign up — you have to wait in a queue. Moreover, your position in the queue is not trivially deterministic — someone might cut in before you if they are willing to pre-pay a longer term. It can be a bit of annoyance and frustration, but it says only one thing about SliceHost — they are so good that it is worth the wait if you are looking for a developer-friendly VPS with good performance.
Update 31 Dec 2007 — SliceHost declared that wait list is dead. Basically there is no more wait list and your account will be created, your slice will be built instantly after you sign up — just like how it used to be!
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Just to play devils advocate there are other reasons why someone may no longer uses a company’s services such as no longer needing a service, or merging services from 2 different providers etc etc etc.
Once you are signed up and have your Slice. It only takes 5 mins to provision another Slice!!
I now have 3 Slices, 2x512 & 1x256.
The SliceHost control panel is just awesome! It’s totally devoid of crap and has everything you need to get your Slice up and running.
They are great :)
I’m going to ditch my 3 VPS’s over at VPS Land soon - their control panels are crap when something goes awry - can’t fault the performance….
Going to move 2 of them to VR Hosted - they are pretty good.
Thanks for sticking with us Scotty! More good stuff planned for the next 12 months :)
I hate slicehost. They were so good and I have been using them for a few months since reading the initial review here. Unfortunately, the latency from my place (Malaysia) was so bad but I have yet to find anything as good as slicehost locally. Yep, one thing that proved the service is good is you never need to file any support request. Things just keep running.
@Nicholas — yes I know that once you are provisioned with one slice, it is much easier to upgrade to a bigger slice or get another slice. Yes so instant provisioning is sort of true here. I just feel bad about those who have been waiting in the queue.
@Matt — thanks for the service. Looking forward to my 2 year review :)
@k4ml — yes, physics and limitation of speed of light sucks. Slicehost is long way from where I am as well (220-240ms return trip). However the speed is good so it somehow compensates the latency — except when I need to to do some heavy editing on SSH :(
Agree with Nicholas - VPS Land are awful - rubbish support and continue to take payments but refuse to give refunds!! Hey SliceHost is sounding good though!
When I was shopping about a while back for a VPS hosting I did come across slicehost however having been burnt in the past by different companies I don’t like doing long term contracts but if the service quality is good I rarely if ever move because it’s more trouble then it’s worth.
I was going through the sign-up process and saw the waiting times at the bottom of the page (I just checked again it’s now up to 11 weeks for 1 month contract) and decided to give them a miss as a result because there was plenty of other options with equally good reputations (opinions are that, subjective) that didn’t have more then 24hrs setup time, in one case it was done at the same time as I was signing up.
I get the welcome email followed by the your server is now ready email 2 mins later.
I have nothing personally against slicehost, and they may be a great company - if you can put up with the wait just to find out one way or the other.
never use of this host before but look forward to try. well I am sort of a person who likes to try new things and make contribution to the hosting industries. Actually I’m looking forward to write review and stories on other hosting companies and hopefully find the best solutions for my readers
Excellent review. I will have to check them out.
Slicehost looks cool. I don’t understand all the people who are willing to pay for a year’s hosting in advance, to jump the queue. Personally, I want to try them out before I make that kind of commitment.
My personal position in the queue? 8 weeks. When did I sign up for that spot? July 25.
I understand their position, and what they’re doing. But this is ridiculous.
Hey James, if you checked your position in the queue lately you’ll see that they’re rolling out the new backend and the your place should go down a lot quicker. Hang in there.
Scott, didn’t you notice that on a 64 bit platform memory consumption is uncomfortably higher than in a 32 bit environment? (In extreme conditions you’ll have to take two 64 bit slices for every 32 bit slice.)
Yes I have (after running two identical setup, one in x86_64 and one in i686).
Agree completely: Slicehost rocks. I signed up a few months ago because we were moving house, and I couldn’t give my “clients” (not as professionally slick as it sounds) continuity from my home-based server.
Although we’ve been in the new house for a couple of months now, and there’s nothing to stop me going me back to home-hosting, the stability, performance (despite US hosting and UK sites), ease of use etc, have taken away any motivation I might have to change.
The value for money is good too - barely more than the electricity I’d use home-hosting, and I don’t use my home bandwidth.
I do notice significantly higher memory usage due to the 64-bittiness of the slice hardware - a 256slice isn’t quite as versatile as the name suggests.
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