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Slicehosted

I moved my site hosting to Slicehost about 6 months ago, and I only have praises about their service. What I like the most about Slicehost is the fact that they give a sense of community with their wiki, forum, and chatroom. Gone are the days when I had to wait for at least a day to get a reply to my queries (think Go Daddy).

There are so many testimonials about how great Slicehost is, so I’m just going to write my Sliceperiences here…

• I messed up one of my startup scripts and accidentally locked myself out of Ubuntu. I logged in to Slicehost chatroom and 30 seconds later a Slicehost staff told me about Slicehost Ajax console. So not only I got a quick answer, I also found out that the console meant I would never get locked out of my VPS.
• Slicehost sent a notification email telling me that my server had been using its swap space consistently after a day of running. This helped me identify something fundamentally wrong with pagination usage in my Rails app, as exampled on Agile Web Development with Rails book. Without the email, I wouldn’t have noticed the memory usage issue that early (the app wasn’t that important to be memory-profiled beforehand).
• One thing that initially led me to Slicehost was my plan to use Google Apps to handle email for my domain. While my previous web host ignored my query re Google Apps usage, setting it up on Slicehost was as easy as modifying some settings on SliceManager with instruction readily available from the forum.

The only downside with moving to the new host is that I couldn’t run Tomcat with several Java webapps with just 256mb (I’m not prepared to fork out more than US$20/month), it’s just not enough. Hence I changed this blog to use WordPress, and rewrote Wish to use Rails with Mongrel, all to squeeze down memory footprint.

All in all, I’m looking forward to using Slicehost for years to come, and to recommend their service to those who look for VPS hosting.

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