Tuesday, March 17, 2009

checking out slicehost

Given the fact that I'm no longer running game servers, email, a blog, and have yet to spend any time rebuilding any of the sites, I've decided to try out a Xen-based VPS from slicehost with an eye towards retiring the dedicated swerver.

The upsides are basically:

1) cost - a VPS is about 25% the cost of a hosted server, with roughly the same access level
2) software based - that means the provisioning of the server was pretty much instant, managing it will be a matter of flipping a switch in a web interface and getting near real-time response
3) size - I can basically back the important bits of the server up to a USB stick. Limited space means I won't be wasting anything on silly stuff like half-compiled projects or stupid videos you could just easily link to ebaumsworld, and that I'll be pushing the big files off onto a storage system like S3 or JungleDisk (where there's a pretty good chance they'll be backed up or at least distributed Enough(tm)).

Haven't looked into whether or not I can rebuild the kernel, but to be honest, I'm at a point where if I need something that requires that, I'm probably not going to stick with it.

I chose the Debian 5.0 install, which was absolutely barebones except for SSH. apt-get the needed services, tar up the appropriate directories on the old server, and then it's just a matter of waiting for DNS to propogate. Pretty easy stuff.

And by way of a review, I'd have to say that I really like slicehost so far. Minimal interaction... just enter the needful data, and stuff happens. I absolutely love it when providers stay out of my hair. :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hear good things about FsckVPS, it's cheap, and good for people who know what they're doing:

http://fsckvps.com/

I'm also very satisfied with rimuhosting, which I believe you recommended to me. They are a bit more expensive though, however, they have great support, and are very lenient.

Unknown said...

fsckvps states that they're an OpenVZ hoster, which is similar to the VPS that you were using back in the day (ie, it's really just a kernel-level accounting seperation instead of a separate instance of the server). If you're in the market for a shared-hosting style setup, that's definitely a good option, but it's not quite the same as instance-based hosting (ie, Xen or VMware).

Glad to hear rimu is working out.. not just that you're satisfied with 'em, but that they're still trucking along. They're some good folks.