

OT: does anybody have a positive experience with slicehost's 256 slice? - ahold

If yes, how many pageviews or visits daily you have?
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rob
We have been using Slicehost's 256MB slice for a little over two months now
for a PHP site and haven't had any issues; uptime has been excellent and
support is great. The fact that they are one of the few providers to offer
Arch Linux is another plus, too.

Another place I personally purchased a VPS from to test out is Linode
(<http://linode.com>). I've only had it for a week so far, but so far no
problems. If you're going to run a Rails app, you might want to look at them
as for $20 they provide 360MB of RAM instead of 256 :) Their community seems
on par with Slicehost. Their Xen is in beta testing, though, so for now their
VPS' run UML.

~~~
marketer
I tried both linode and slicehost, and I far prefer slicehost. Their service
is absolutely amazing, but more importantly they have hardware virtualization,
instead of linode which only offers UML

~~~
cstejerean
I was considering between linode and slicehost. Linode signup process was a
big hassle compared to slicehost so I picked slicehost. I've been very
satisfied to date (2x 256 and 1x 512 slice)

~~~
cstejerean
Here is a post I wrote a while ago about the reasons why I picked Slicehost
over Linode <http://blog.offbytwo.com/2008/01/05/moving-to-slicehost/>

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Todd
I have nothing but good things to say about Slicehost. That said, 256 is a
very small sandbox and Apache doesn't play nicely in small sandboxes without
tweaking. Our site runs several PHP apps.

We hit the wall one day with a number of apache2 processes hitting the 60-80MB
range. I could barely SSH in to fix things.

We ended up arriving empirically at the following (taken from
/etc/apache2/apache2.conf), without stress testing, but watching patterns over
several weeks.

    
    
      <IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
          StartServers          2
          MinSpareServers       3
          MaxSpareServers       6
      #    MaxClients            150
          MaxClients            10
      #    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
          MaxRequestsPerChild   200
      </IfModule>
    

The key is to take MaxClients down to a small number, like 8-10, as each of
these normally takes anywhere from 2-40MB. To make this work, you'll need to
have the request count set reasonably small. We set ours to 200, so RAM
consumption doesn't get too large before the process is cycled. People often
suggest 4000 or some such number but the process just grew too large with that
setting. You'll also note that we have tuned the startup and idle parameters
to be very conservative.

This is probably a laughable configuration for many sites, but it works well
for a light site like ours running a few PHP apps. I should note that we're
also running MySQL and PostgreSQL. They don't have a big impact on RAM under
light load.

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carpal
I did pretty well on a 256 meg slice. I outgrew it after awhile, and I'm
currently running 8 mongrels on a 512 slice, and I'm pretty much hitting the
top.

RAM is by far the biggest bottleneck for me.

Overall, Slicehost is great. I just wish they'd include more RAM in their
plans.

~~~
nikolaj
I have several slices.. putting nginx in front of apache and lowering down
apache's processes has really helped me tighten up my memory needs (I use
django).

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conorh
I have a 256 meg slice which has been rock solid and with no issues. I use
Litespeed (<http://www.litespeedtech.com/>) for the web server. It is
excellent for Ruby on Rails hosting. It dynamically manages Ruby processes -
if there is no traffic it shuts down the processes, if there is traffic it
ramps up the number as necessary up to the max that you specify.

On my slice I have a few PHP sites, a few static sites and 4 RoR sites (most
of which get very little traffic.) Overall about 30k page views a day.

Litespeed isn't open source, but it is free and it works great for my hosting.

~~~
rms
What control panel are you using with it? I would switch to Litespeed if i
could keep using Virtualmin...

~~~
stillmotion
When you get to a stage of using a VPS or your own dedicated machine it's
highly recommended that you begin to learn how to use your server without a
control panel. You'll be glad you did.

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walesmd
Slicehost is amazing. I'm currently running 3 Wordpress blogs off of a 256MB
slice. I would highly recommend either ditching Apache or going with a larger
slice though. I did experience some memory issues when using Apache (although
this could be cleared up with a bit more configuration on my end).

Regardless, I'm running Lighttpd (10 work handlers using the same amount of
RAM as 1 Apache handler), proftpd, MySQL 5, PHP5 via FastCGI, and sendmail.
I've never dipped below 80MB RAM left and load times are extremely quick.

I've offloaded my email services to Google Apps, which has it's advantageous
and disadvantageous.

~~~
apgwoz
Is sendmail setup to route mail through Google then? I've been trying to
figure out the best way to approach email. Right now, I'm using google apps
and a Django patch for TLS support. It's not ideal and I'd like to change the
setup.

~~~
lyime
You can have Google Apps and Postfix installed on your slice.
Articles.slicehost.com Guide 1 and 2 walk you through setting those things up.
Its trivial and powerful.

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edavis10
I've had both Slicehost and Linode, and Slicehost is much faster by far (Xen).
I used the 256 slice to power a few of my Rails applications, but I upgraded
to the 512 so I can add more.

The best experience I had with Slicehost was the upgrade from 256 to 512. It
was a couple clicks on their admin panel, 30 minutes of downtime, and then a
quick SSH to verify everything was good.

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hollywoodcole
This question pops up a lot on Slicehost's Forum. Search for "views 256" @
<http://forum.slicehost.com/search.php>. You will see all the many people
running from blogs to rails on 256mb without a problem.

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evilicious
I just posted about doing some basic load testing on my 256 slice here:

[http://blog.notedpath.com/2008/02/10/using-jmeter-for-
load-t...](http://blog.notedpath.com/2008/02/10/using-jmeter-for-load-
testing/)

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boucher
Actually, we've been having some issues with our 256 slice. We're running our
svn and trac off it, and trac runs incredibly slow. Our app has poor data
transfer rates when we send anything of a significant size over the wire.

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bosky101
on slicehost 256mb ram, running erlang + yaws . nice documentation, setup. but
off late have have to do couple of server restarts , coz of what seems like to
be unscheduled reboots . need to investigate. so helps a lot to have a service
like monitorus etc that pings u via mail when the server down,etc.

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speric
Yes, my experience so far has been positive. I got Ruby on Rails up and
running fairly easily; it's documented here:

[http://www.perplexedlabs.com/2008/02/04/building-a-rails-
cap...](http://www.perplexedlabs.com/2008/02/04/building-a-rails-capable-
slice-from-scratch/)

~~~
joshwa
Deprec also works nicely for the initial setup

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richcollins
I host my blog and personal site on it. I haven't had a single issue.

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luccastera
I've been using SliceHost for almost a year now and I'm very happy with their
service.

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alaskamiller
<http://searchyc.com> is hosted on linode for a couple of months now and it's
been great. we initially wanted to go with slicehost but last year their wait
list was so atrociously long that we gave up on ever seeing their invite.

for the same $19.99 linode has more bandwidth and memory and xen support.
really, what we've realized is actually most expensive is the cpu cycles since
our app would crash consistently because the shared resources peaked when we
started stress testing. since then with better resource management, better
apache fiddling, and a couple rewrites we're handling a peak loads of more
than 2000 people and an average load of 500 people.

linode's documentation is somewhat lacking, i much prefer slicehost's wiki and
forum for support but other than that we have a cluster of 4 or 5 linodes
running and it's been great.

