Hands Down, Best VPS Hosting at Slicehost
If you are, or soon will be, in the market for a good hosting company – my highest recommendations go to Slicehost, a Saint Louis, MO based hosting company that blows all competition out of the water. For about six months now, I’ve held a basic-level “slice” (their term for a single VPS) for $20 per month, and I could not be happier with both the services rendered, and the support offered by the Slicehost staff.
Slicehost
Last week, one of the HDDs on my physical host failed. Every slice is hosted on RAID 10, so I didn’t lose any data. I received an email when the team noticed my slice was performing oddly, another to alert me that they’d diagnosed the problem and to me know that they’d be freezing the VPS image and migrating me to another physical host. About a half an hour later, a third email arrived saying the migration was successful and that I should check my server to make sure everything had been restored properly.
Well, everything went fine, except I’ve noticed since then my slice was performing rather poorly. After checking around, I was convinced that the sluggishness wasn’t caused by anything on my end, so I contacted the Slicehost staff via their web chatroom. Within five minutes, the team member I was speaking with had diagnosed the issue (one of the other slices on my host was trashing badly) and kicked the slice (the account was inactive anyway).
With “corporate” hosting companies, the support chain begins with a web form request for email support and usually ends with a taste of mild dissatisfaction and wasted time. With smaller hosting companies, you find personalized support, but the web-based management tools, supported systems, infrastructure, and sense of cohesiveness (at both the business level and the technical level) typically lack. Slicehost is the perfect mix.
Competitive prices, a fantastic web management interface, reliably fat tubes (I usually see about 3-6 MB/s), and unparalleled personalized support from staff who are always cordial, knowledgeable, and willing to help with any issue. Two thumbs way up for the folks over at Slicehost. Even if you’re “happy” with your current hosting provider, check them out. You won’t be disappointed.
Note: I linked to their site a million times for a reason. Check them out!
Thanks for the great write up.
Let us know if you ever need anything!
Paul
I’ve been using slicehost for well over a year. Everything runs exactly as i expect it too. But saying they are the best out there is a stretch.
Amazon is obviously a huge competitor. And the handicap that the servers are located in the us and subject to the patriot act is a problem.
But for most people slicehost should accomdate there goals.
As far as I can tell, rackspace cloud is the same thing as slicehost (rackspace acquired slicehost) for about 1/2 the cost
@Jason Rackspace Cloud Servers are billed like a utility: you pay by the hour for the VPS, and you pay for bandwidth usage on top of that. Slicehost offers monthly plans (prorated per diem), which include a monthly bandwidth allowance.
So whether Cloud Servers are actually cheaper than Slices will depend on your usage.
I feel compelled to give a recommendation for Linode (I’ve never tried Slicehost or any others). I’ve been with them for nearly 5 years now for my personal server and nearly 2 years for Birdstack.com. Support is great, and often just catching one of the admins on their IRC channel has been enough to solve my problems (which have been very very few). Over the last 5 years, I’ve had maybe 10 hours total downtime that was their fault–I don’t really remember for sure. And, a recent performance comparison puts them at the top: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
Anywho, maybe Slicehost is awesome, just wanted to give a shoutout for Linode. :-)
A HD failure should be handled transparently by the hosting company, and you should be migrated to another host without any service interruption, and the new host that you’re migrated to should be able to host your VPS with the same level of service.
Although they have good chat support, and I love (and use) their product, this story is not as positive as you make it out to be.
@Fjord Actually, Linode was the runner-up in my VPS searching… to be honest though, I forget just what the deciding factor was.
@rob t Good perspective. Although necessarily there must be /some/ (however brief or trivial) service interruption when migrating hosts, I agree that the issue could have been dealt with a lot more transparently, and I hope the folks at Slicehost are working hard on doing just that. More to the point is the fact that the staff there are responsive, helpful and friendly in dealing with circumstances from the most mundane to the most exceptional. How often, when dealing with a business (any business… a VPS hosting company, a department store, a pizza shop) do you walk away thinking to yourself “Wow – that was really exceptional service”? It says a lot about Slicehost as a business, and as a team – the technical stuff will continue to refine itself.
@rob t
really, no migration needs to happen with raid 10 just a straight drive replacement unless both drives where failing. So he shouldn’t have been informed unless there was a possible corruption of data.
Also nice to hear that anyone that could be trashing the server is going to get kicked. Makes me feel very comfortable :p
Sounds like Slicehost isn’t a big fan of respecting their customers’ privacy policies, if they told you about the neighbor of yours who was thrashing.
@Derek Broderick I’m not sure how this represents a privacy breach. As a customer with less-than-expected performance, I had the right to know why my slice was under-performing (a thrashing neighbor) and what was being done to mitigate the problem (kicking the slice). The fact that the account was inactive is irrelevant, and no personally identifiable information was revealed. I’d have no way of knowing exactly which slice was misbehaving, which account it was linked to, or who owned that account.
@rob t VPSs which exist as Xen domU’s aren’t floating in some ethereal layer above the hardware — each virtual server is very much tied to the hardware it’s running on. Migrating a Xen domU to a different host server isn’t a big deal, but the way this currently works with Slicehost and many other Xen-based services typically involves an rsync of the VPS’s data (in several steps) and a little bit (or a lot, if it’s a huge filesystem) of downtime.
@tech-no-junk-ie You’re exactly right about two disks failing at the same time. 99 times out of 100, if a “disk issue” has resulted in VPSs needing to be migrated off a server with disks in a RAID 10 configuration, it means that two+ of the disks are failing at the same time — support staff have got to get the customers off that box before data gets lost!! In datacenters with thousands of servers, you do see that from week to week — it’s just a matter of probability in terms of the failure of electro-mechanical devices.
@Derek Broderick I’ve got to agree with Chris here. A hosting company should be able to tell other customers on a box that “some other customer’s misbehaving VPS” is the cause of performance degradation for all customers on that box. Doing so need not reveal any personal information, IPs, etc., about the other account holder nor his VPS. It would be nice if the various virtualization platforms so completely and perfectly isolated VMs that they can’t affect one another; however, that’s note the case in the real world. For example, heavy swap usage by one VPS can lead to crappy I/O wait times for other VPSs on the same box that are hitting the disks pretty hard themselves. Newer versions of Xen are helping with that, but it’s the kind of thing that support staff for these hosting companies are dealing with.
Never been used as one of my VPS host. I should try this after I finished my contract on Dreamhost. :) If its the best I should try it and I will add it to the top 10 vps list.