
Slicehost is smarter than I am - boundlessdreamz
http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/jun/03/slicehost/
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tdavis
I don't think this wonderment really applies to non-dedicated hosting (however
awesome Slicehost might be). When dealing with shared hosting of any sort (VPS
included), it's a reasonable assumption that the host will stay fully on top
of hardware issues, since you are not paying for a physical box.

If something craps out in one of my dedicated machines, I'll alert the host or
NOC to have the fault looked into and fixed. If something craps out in a box
hosting my home directory or VPS or what have you along with numerous others,
I already expect that to be automatically detected and fixed within an
acceptable timeframe. Ideally, in a VPS environment, my machine(s) should be
migrated to a working box in the interim.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
expectation != reality. hence the wonderment, I think.

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mdasen
From my perspective, this is the only way that one can do business now-a-days.
It's not because people demand good customer service or that they have a
responsibility to do it. It's because not doing it takes more work and more
effort over the long run.

So, Slicehost has something monitoring their boxen and alerting them and they
deal with the problems. What if they didn't? They'd be getting emails from
customers, have to go check it out, most of the time it would be the
customer's fault (they powered it down or turned off the Apache service or set
the firewall rules wrong) and they'd waste all this time and effort for
nothing. It wouldn't make their service better. It's just spinning one's
wheels and worse, it doesn't scale. If you're constantly checking boxen,
you're going to have to hire more staff as you grow to also check on boxen.

And this is something that one can automate. It both lowers the amount of
labor, effort, confusion, and swearing involved _and_ raises the level of
service offered.

I see it the way I see my code tests. Sure, they're annoying to write
sometimes, but what's more annoying in the long run is having random errors
that I don't know about or worrying that a change I made broke something not
readily apparent. My tests make my software glamorous because, while they
aren't glamorous or cool or anything, they prevent me from having to do _even
less glamorous_ things later as I scramble to fix something.

I just couldn't imagine working where I didn't have things watching my back
like that. It would be a nightmare of "oh $#*^! what's wrong" and lots of
time/energy/effort wasted on something even more annoying than being prepared.

~~~
blhack
It's like anything (hosting I mean.)

I don't care what you _THINK_ you're selling, you're not. You're selling
customer service.

Lets look at my favorite bar. I go there ALL the time. It isn't even remotely
close to my house (anymore), and the beer is silly expensive (because it's
really _good_ ). OF COURSE I could run to the local liquor store and buy it,
OF COURSE that would be cheaper, OF COURSE I could then enjoy as much of it as
I want in the comfort of my living room without having to worry about driving
home (meaning I usually only get to have 1 or _maybe_ 2 beers).

So why do I keep going? Because all of the bartenders know me by name, they
all know what sorts of beer I like (they have over 500 beers here, so them
knowing what I want helps if they're making suggestions) and my glass is NEVER
empty (If I'm having a friend drive).

On multiple occasions, the bartenders have said "Hey, I just put 20 free
credits in the jukebox, you should go over and pick some songs".

One time, I had ridden my bike there and it started raining...I was about to
head home when the bartender set a beer down in front of me and said "Why
don't you wait it out, this one's on me".

It's the exact same thing with hosting, or bananas, or toilet seats, car
alarms, computers, lightbulbs, EVERYTHING.

OF COURSE I could set up a box on my own, OF COURSE I could find a bandwidth
provider and pay them, OF COURSE I could round up enough of my friends to make
the cost of running the server less than what I spend a day on coffee, OF
COURSE I could keep spare hardware on hand for when it goes down, but you know
what?

I don't! I don't do it because to ME, it is worth buying the customer service
from slicehost to have them do it for me. THAT is what I'm buying. I'm not
buying server space, or bandwidth, or anything like that, I'm buying
_SERVICE_.

Some companies are have figured this out (the one I work for is one of them),
and those that have are thriving right now.

(if anyone here is curious, the bar I'm talking about is called 'Papago
Brewery' and it is in Phoenix, AZ...if you're in Phoenix, stopping here is
worth it, trust me).

~~~
maxer
excellent comment... very inspirational and have copied and pasted into a txt
doc to re-read

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grandalf
Slicehost is awesome. I have received a few such emails before, mostly
alerting me that a slice needed to be rebooted, etc.

I've tried Joyent and had a HORRIBLE experience, and I've had a frustrating
experience dealing with EngineYard's overly complicated sales process.

I was worried that the Rackspace acquisition of slicehost would kill the
awesome customer service, but it seems only to have made more resources (for
things like bigger slices) available.

I couldn't recommend any company more highly than Slicehost.

* Wanted: Slices with dedicated SSD storage!

~~~
buro9
* Wanted: The ability to put slices next to each other physically on gigabit links within the slicehost network (non-public traffic)

~~~
wmf
I'm curious; what throughput are you getting on the private network now?

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buro9
iperf says: [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.1 sec 92.0 MBytes
76.5 Mbits/sec

Though what it doesn't say is the network latency, and for queries going over
the back end that's what matters: <http://www.bigdbahead.com/?p=119>

So I'm not looking for gigabit for the bandwidth per se, but for the reduced
latency that it offers.

~~~
wmf
Did you measure the latency? I would guess that Slicehost's network is already
gigabit and you are getting something like a 1/12th share of it.

------
pert
I don't think that a hosting company that monitors their servers deserves this
much credit. I have a few co-located boxes for personal projects and, even
though the services they run aren't that critical, I still monitor them using
Nagios. It's not hard and it should be something that every systems
administrator sets up as a matter of course.

I do, however, agree that 20 minutes down-time for a hardware failure is
impressive. I wonder if they just yanked the disks from one box and jammed
them in a spare?

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medianama
I wasn't this lucky. My slice was once down for 12 hours or so and nobody told
me...

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dmix
I had a similar experiance when I posted on twitter about my interest in
switching to Ec2 from slicehost. About 5min later I got a reply via twitter
from slicehost asking if there was anything they can do to improve the
service.

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eli
I've had very good experience with Rackspace support. They managed to bail me
out in a matter of minutes when I fat-fingered an iptables config and made the
box totally unreachable.

Not cheap, though.

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spkthed
Giving serious thought to getting a rackmount or cloud slice with these guys.
Stories like these are darn impressive.

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piramida
Paid advertisement? I've been to a number of VPS hosters that do just that and
much more - ServInt, Knownhost, liquidweb etc - and they have better plans
too.

~~~
SergeyHack
Your examples do not offer >2Gb of RAM. Some of them are not based on Xen.
Their pricing is not much better too.

Slicehost is not the cheapest, but it is known for the great attitude to the
customers. And it is not expensive too.

~~~
davidw
The 64bit only stuff really hurts them, though. In my comparison (Google for
it, I feel bad for linking to it too much), Slicehost is a bit more expensive
than Linode to start with, but it's not a huge difference; it's something you
could ignore. Throw in the 64bit vs 32bit though, and you really see a big
jump in price that's difficult to justify.

