Downtime sucks, but it sort of reminded you how good it has been. HostingFu, along with about a dozen other sites hosted on this SliceHost VPS, were down between 8pm and 10pm AEST last night, when traffic is about the busiest from Australia. No good. Maybe that is one reason for hosting locally in Australia so the datacentre won’t schedule network maintenance at inconvenient time. Then I feel sorry for the now gang-of-four at SliceHost as the network dropped out at 4AM in the morning, CST time!

Here is the network graph generated by Cacti.

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.

SliceHost has never failed to introduce unique features that impress me. They gave you console access via Ajaxterm, which allows you to rescue badly configured server over nothing but HTTPS. They have also recently introduced “Rescue Mode” for their VPS — another feature that you wish you never would need to use, but is super useful when you need it. It shuts down your VPS, reboots in a separate partition, and enables you to mount your VPS partition as /dev/sda1 for 90 minutes.

Oh no! Why do I need another VPS for? Anyway, I have just signed up with SliceHost earlier this week, getting a 256Mb “Slice” of Xen-powered VPS, running Gentoo Linux on their dual dual-core Opteron servers. So far so good, and here’s my initial impression.

Two hours ago I tried to go to my daughter’s website, and all that was presented was an error message from my proxy server saying (113) No route to host. D’oh. Is the server down again? The website is hosted on an OpenVZ VPS on VPSLink running Gentoo Linux, and VPSLink has been very stable and fast over the last 3 months that I have been with them.