
Slicehost adds more sizes, more bandwidth, and "Professional Services" - JshWright
http://www.slicehost.com/2010/02/17/new-slice-sizes-price-changes-and-bandwidth-increases/
======
jeff18
For some context -- Slicehost has had sort of a user insurrection on their
forums, complaining that despite their massive influx of capital from
Rackspace, Slicehost is totally uncompetitive with Linode and the hundreds of
other nearly identical, commoditized hosts.

The creator has been apologizing for many months acknowledging that Slicehost
has been falling signficantly behind and has stagnated. However, he has been
saying essentially "Don't give up yet because February this will all change."

This is the February announcement. Basically you get slightly more bandwidth.

~~~
patio11
_other nearly identical, commoditized hosts._

Funny, I always use Slicehost as the example of a non-commoditized hosting
arrangement: back when you could get disk space and terabytes of (gratuitously
oversold and capriciously available) bandwidth for $2 a month, they charged
ten times that for 256 MB of RAM that would _actually be there when you wanted
to use it_ , plus really outstanding support and reliability. Some years later
they've got competition in their space, but I still see outstanding support
and reliability.

I wouldn't mind an extra gig of RAM and a pony but I'm not fixing to move
anytime soon.

~~~
bugs
You really should try out linode for a day and even if it comes out equal to
slicehost in the end you really have no reason not to switch as it will get
you more for the same price. (Unless of course your server setup is so
immensely complicated that you can't afford the time it would take to setup a
new one.)

~~~
patio11
Its a question of priorities: I pay $150 a month for hosting. Next to my
sales, that's mouse droppings. Getting an extra 512 MB of RAM or 1 GB of RAM
at the same price is pretty meaningless to me: the app runs. Running on more
RAM will not help me sell more software.

Hypothetically saving $50 a month on hosting is also less than motivating to
me -- "Try a new host out for a day" means I lose a day that could be sent
implementing things that will increase the amount of software I sell in a
scalable fashion. For example, A/B testing (or SEO, or writing better email
copy, or...). Note that future improvements to cost reduction are not
multiplicatively effective but future A/B tests (etc) are. (Saving $50 on
hosting costs is a one-off improvement -- it doesn't make my next improvement
_more_ effective. Increasing conversions by 1.3% anywhere in my funnel right
now would make me about $50 a month. A 1.3% lift _does_ make my next
improvement more effective because funnel conversions are essentially
multiplicative: 10% improvement at gate A and 10% improvement at gate B means
21% improvement total, not 20%. Most of you probably already know this but if
it is news to you bookmark this factoid and come back to it later because it
is really freaking important.)

~~~
bugs
_Getting an extra 512 MB of RAM or 1 GB of RAM at the same price is pretty
meaningless to me_

 _I wouldn't mind an extra gig of RAM and a pony_

The second statement highlighted is why I said you should try linode for a
day. To clarify what I meant is you should try linode out (not as a production
server) but to see if you can use it the same for that extra gig of ram for
the same cost or less with minimal effort.

I really wasn't trying to say it would save you money in the end or that it
would help sell software as you seem to think.

Edit: and btw your Buy Now button is still really hard to see as I commented
before

~~~
Poiesis
_I really wasn't trying to say it would save you money in the end or that it
would help sell software as you seem to think._

I think you might be missing the point here. If it does not in fact save
significant money or help sell software-- _he's not interested_.

I have a (currently underused) slicehost account. In my opinion these guys
have historically been known for awesome customer service. They need to
continue to do that, and not try to compete on price. I am not optimistic
about their ability to deliver amazing service after the Rackspace
acquisition, though.

~~~
davidw
Linode has good customer service too.

------
callahad
I think it's time to pack my bags and go support Linode or Prgmr for a bit.
Slicehost is clearly in a comfortable place, and I'd rather help spur on the
competition.

------
brandon272
We transferred from Slicehost to Linode a few months ago. I believe that the
Rackspace acquisition turned Slicehost into a zombie company that is not being
run with the same common sense attention to care I was seeing when I
originally became a customer.

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antpicnic
Too bad they didn't match Linode's offerings. <http://www.linode.com/>

~~~
bugs
There are so many reasons I am glad I started and stayed with linode for a
VPS. All I hear about slicehost anymore is that they fall under linode in
benchmarks, they require 64bit OSs (don't know if this has changed), and they
fail to meet other VPS offers.

Personal experience: Linode move from a linode 360 to a linode 540 took under
15 minutes from time submitting support ticket to resizing and rebooting, pro
rating pricing is very awesome

~~~
ericd
To be fair, at least in my personal experience with slicehost, it's been
extremely quick on resizes (automated), and they prorate as well.

The pricing isn't so good, though.

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alextgordon
Sad to see them go. I guess it was inevitable when Rackspace bought them.

They _should have_ matched Linode's offer. Perhaps some additional features to
entice Linode customers over to Slicehost. Instead we get more packages and a
slightly more dreary website. That's not competition.

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pavs
I am hoping HN moves to a better host. Is it just me or the site has been
going down quite often and slowed to crawl most of the time?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
What is YN?

~~~
pavs
:) Fixed it. I always screw up HN with the YC logo and call it YN.

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davidw
Having played a small part in the general migration to Linode (
<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode> ) , I think it's
unfortunate that Slicehost doesn't up their game a bit more. I actually
started with them after moving away from Layered Tech, and Slicehost are good,
competent people with a good product. They wouldn't be _that_ far behind
Linode if they'd ditch the "64 bit only" thing. They don't seem to want to
change though. I wouldn't have even written that article if they had said they
were working on 32 bit support.

Also, I hope that the influx of people to Linode doesn't degrade their ability
to do the good job that I've experienced so far.

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leftnode
I'm a long time Slicehost customer, and really like them. I like the new site
layout. If the layout is whats stopping you from being a customer, then I'm
not sure why anyone would use Prgmr. Basically, its usable, so I see no reason
to complain.

I wish the big announcement was that they were doubling their disk size or
some sort. I've had websites die because a valid MySQL connection couldn't be
made because the slice ran out of disk space.

Edit: Oh wow, while I was typing this up, they changed back to their old
design.

Edit #2: Double wow, Prgrm's prices are amazing. I think its time to check
them out.

------
JshWright
So this was the big February annoucement... color me unimpressed.

Also... the new site design is absurdly bad.

~~~
dpcan
I completely disagree about the website design, I think it's amazing.

As for the announcement, a $25 slice, a little more bandwidth, I agree,
unimpressed.

I don't think it mattered that they matched Linode's prices like others are
saying. Their prices are fine for such minor differences.

Personally, I was hoping for backups on slices over 2GB.

~~~
davidw
The differences are not minor, though. 20$ gets you 256M on Slicehost, 360 on
Linode. You _also_ have to factor in that you're forced to use 64 bits on the
Slicehost system, so you get less bang for your buck.

~~~
joeyh
You're only forced to use 64 bit userspace on slicehost if debootstrapping a
32 bit chroot and replacing the root filesystem with it live is too scary. :)

The real nice thing about linode is they allow running your own custom linux
kernel.

~~~
davidw
Even were it a straight comparison, Linode is still cheaper, so why would I
pay for the privilege of fooling around every time I want to set up a new
instance?

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radu_floricica
I started using slicehost just about when they were bought by Rackspace. While
I can only praise their services, the prices have become from competitive to
obviously premium. Also they have no servers in Europe, which really hurts me.

I've started moving to a local company, www.intovps.com. They don't offer the
same stability (I had a sporadically bad connection for about 4 days before it
was fixed), but the prices are exactly 1/4 and performance is good.

I'd probably move completely if I didn't have a lot of DNS records with
slicehost. Anybody knows how I could migrate them from slicehost to linode or
somewhere else?

~~~
slig
linode's DNS manager can import your dns zones. You still have to do one by
one, though.

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whalesalad
Why is everyone complaining about a site redesign? As far as I can tell it
looks exactly the same? Was the CSS file not included or something so everyone
freaked out? I'd love to hear some context on all of this...

~~~
bugs
They seemed to have changed it back, nav was on top and colors were all weird
and overall the site looked rather ugly compared to the original design.

------
noodle
i'm not sure if i'd call it a "big" announcement, but it is definitely useful
for someone in my shoes.

i agree that the new design is not good, although i didn't really like the
older one either. a lateral move, in my mind.

------
ericd
I really just want more RAM for the money. It's a sad day when my Mediatemple
VPS (3 GB) is more cost effective than Slicehost.

~~~
pavs
No offence, MediaTemple sucks. They can be more cost effective but their
uptime and performance is absolutely horrible. I almost lost a big client
because of their constant outage and performance issues. I learned my lesson
and moved out.

The only thing I can't comment on is their Dedicated server services because I
haven't used it. But honestly, there are better DS out there with almost half
of MT's price with same configuration.

~~~
ericd
Are you talking about the GS? I had a lot of trouble with it when I tried it,
but decided to try the DV before giving up on them. It's been a world of
difference - it's been rock solid, fast, and seemingly invariate in
performance.

The prices listed for the DVs might seem high, but they've been good about
bumping up RAM allocation for free. The amount listed isn't the amount you
actually get, and with the free extra, it's more cost effective than
Slicehost, as well as Linode (at least at the 3 GB pricepoint).

Agreed, their DS is way overpriced.

~~~
pavs
I have used both DV and GS. DV for clients and GS for personal use. Both
horrible.

For dedicated servers I used hostgator. It was good, but they can't match the
price of Slicehost/Linode VPS price (last time I checked).

To be honest, unless you are running a HUGE project (a la
digg/reddit/twitter), slicehost/Linode type VPS are more than enough. You can
start small and slowly scale as you get bigger. Their largest VPS will meet
the needs of most medium sized web business out there.

~~~
carbocation
I second this. I am moving off of their $150/month Rage DV to a couple of
linodes. I started with a $50/month Base DV, then quickly upgraded as I
started hitting memory limits, and finally went to Rage when I was having I/O
thrashing issues (even during my site's "off hours"...). That didn't help at
all. Since the next step up at MT is a $750/month Nitro, I was left with two
more palatable choices: add another DV, or jump hosts.

I'll make an update when I finish the transfer to linode and figure out
exactly what sized linodes I end up needing. I'll also let people know if this
was simply my fault (bad coding).

------
gojomo
Given so many fine gradiations of slice-size, it'd be interesting to see an
analysis, for distributable workloads, when it's better to use more smaller
slices vs. fewer larger slices of similar cost. (On what sort of jobs will 12
256slices for $240 beat one 4096 slice for $250, and so forth?)

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eli
I'm confused about the relationship between slicehost and Rackspace Cloud
Servers -- are they just two different pricing models for the same thing?

~~~
wmf
More or less, yes. I think the control panels look different.

~~~
jsatok
I spoke to a Rackspace Cloud Servers Engineer a few months back, and he said
that they're the same servers (same specs), in the same data centre. Not sure
if he's 100% accurate, but regardless, as the customer, the only differences I
see are different control panel design, inclusion of bandwidth in price vs
"pay as you go", and a monthly vs hourly billing.

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tocomment
When is linode getting cheaper? I've been paying the same price for three
years. I'd love to upgrade.

~~~
scotty
Well, the price stayed the same but they had given you 20% more RAM a bit over
2 years ago (<http://blog.linode.com/2007/12/23/20-additional-ram/>) and 33%
more disk space less than a year ago
(<http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/23/33-additional-disk-space/>).

------
j_b_f
Weird, that blog post reads just like a Steve Jobs keynote, albeit a pretty
unimpressive one.

