sysadminman.net

When I was looking round for my first VPS a few months ago I had decided to sign up with Slicehost, however, they were not taking on any new customers at that time. Initially I was dissapointed but thinking about it it’s much better for them to not take on any new customers while they havn’t got the infrastructure to deal with them. I think there’s very few providers that would actually turn customers away to preserve to service to the rest of their customers.

So I signed up with a few other providers to get a feel for what was on offer and what level of support was available. I’ve got VPS’s with Tektonic, cheapvps and betterhost.ca. I’ve had mixed experiences with them - some good and some bad.

So, now Slicehost have got their new servers setup I decided to move one of my VPS’s to them. This VPS was originally hosted with Tektonic and was running my Zencart demonstration site. It wasn’t running too badly with Tektonic but I was getting some lag waiting for disk IO. I wasn’t sure how much of this was to fo with Zencart and how much to do with the VPS. Really I should have raised a call with Tektonic but as I wanted to give Slicehost a go anyway I signed up for a 256mb slice running CentOS 5.

The setup was extremely easy and the VPS creation was fully automated - taking only about 10 minutes. They have quite a nice, custom made, management interface. I would definitely call it a management interface rather than a control panel as you’re not going to be able to configure the OS from here. This is fine for me but be warned - you’re going to need to configure you VPS by hand.

There is a nice console interface giving you access to your VPS if you can’t ssh to it for some reason. I was a bit dissapointed that backups for an extra $5 a month - I hadn’t realised they weren’t included in the price.

I’ve set zencart up again and the performance is much better - no lagging at all. I’m not sure how many customers a 256mb slice can serve but hopefully I’ll find out 

I was pretty sure I’d be impressed with Slicehost, they have a good reputation and so far I’ve not been dissapointed. The have a ‘campfire’ chat room where you can go and chat to them instead of placing a ticket. If you know there’s a definite problem with a VPS I’d always recommend placing a ticket but chatting to someone can help you narrow down the problem.

So far it’s a definite thumbs up for Slicehost.

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