Life is grand

I have been looking around for a suitable hosting system for awhile now. I currently use TextDrive and they are very good at what they do but they have outgrown me in many ways. I am on shared hosting with them and find it too restrictive while their other offerings that would suit me are a bit too complicated or expensive. Their focus has moved to commercial properties rather than the lone developer who wants decent hosting.

So what do I want? I want root access, I want my own CPU time, memory and HD and I want an IP address. Nothing more, nothing less. My DNS is handled fine already, email is sorted and I’m not in the market for load balancing or auto-expanding resources. Preferably I want to be able to build up my own OS image and use that.

SliceHost (referral link) is pretty much all that and it is at a decent price, $20 per month. Five minutes after signing up with them last night I SSHed into a fresh build of Ubuntu Gutsy on a dedicated IP address. They are a VPS provider running Xen which means that what I am logging into with root access is for all intents and purposes the same as if I had my own dedicated box and had set it up myself. Every command I tried worked without a hitch, no restrictions, no permission problems and nobody else’s misbehaving application intruding on my resources (or my misbehaving application intruding on their’s.)

The web console SliceHost provide is also just right. They built it themselves and it does everything you need quickly and easily. I tested the rebuild feature and 2 minutes later I had a fresh slice.

Over the next few weeks and months I’ll be building a Rails app. on my slice and I’ll report back on how it goes. I also want to test out the backup and clone feature which lets you build one slice and then clone it to other slices. i.e. install nginx, Rails, MySQL, Mongrel, SSL etc. and then copy that installation to other machines for a load-balanced system. I’ll also have a go at using my SliceHost slice to control on-demand Amazon EC2 instances and use Amazon S3 storage. Maybe even some Amazon SimpleDB (got my beta invite yesterday.)

So far SliceHost (referral link) are simple, cheap, easy and fast. Reliability will be gauged in the coming months.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.