Up until the other day, I ran Radoff.com at a hosting provider at a major Internet media/hosting company (who I’ll refrain from naming). It was a clunky service with lots of cumbersome interfaces, but it ran PHP (without a command-line!) which made it able to run some cool stuff like Wordpress. However, there were always tons of limitations, customer service was non-existent, and basic changes always required me to navigate a ton of annoying interfaces.
Over the weekend, I switched Radoff.com to Slicehost… And wow, what a relief. If you’re comfortable with a command-line Linux environment, I don’t know why you’d ever want something else. You get a full Linux distro up in the cloud; you can run whatever operating system build you want (I went with Ubuntu Hardy). It took only minutes to get Wordpress up-and-running (although it took hours to extract my data from the aforementioned major Internet hosting/media company).
A few of the things I like:
- Even the cheapest “slice” ($20/month) has more than enough computing power for most people. I imagine that the early stages of a big commercial application would have no problems getting started with some of the bigger slices.
- You can do anything you want with it.
- Backups are built-in and a very simple interface; easier than anything I’ve seen on dedicated hosts.
- Customer service isn’t available by phone, but that’s a good thing. The customer service folks are all in Campfire, and they’re just a click away from answering anything you might need help with.
It also seems that while services like Amazon EC2 seem to get significantly more expensive once any real scale is achieved, but that the pricing economics of Slicehost appear to remain superior to dedicated colocation even at commercial-grade scale.
Rackspace bought Slicehost last year. I’m excited to see how they grow this business.
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Thanks for the write up, please let us know if we can help with anything and welcome aboard.