Bomb.org.uk

25.08.2009 Slice n Dice

Well… after months of dicking about and shifting from one hosting provider to another, I have finally found one provider that I’m truly happy with.

At first, on the recommendation of other geeks, I signed up for a VPS with MediaTemple in the USA. I had heard loads of great things about them and they have an awesome website, but there VPS was just a big fat fail for me. I’m not sure why but in the couple of months I was with them, they performed several bouts of maintenance, suffered from extremely laggy performance, all that coupled with my pet peeve Plesk was enough to drive me straight out of their arms and into the arms of another.

That other turned out to be Slicehost. Slicehost aren’t like other hosting providers, there’s no ‘plan’ as such, just a choice of distro’s available in a choice of sizes. You pick what you want and then you are on your own to configure that distro however you like. To be honest, on your own is probably about as far from the truth as it could get – their support staff are on hand 24/7 and always extremely helpful no matter what the problem. I suppose ‘free’ would be a better way of phrasing it.

My Slicehost (virtual) server has always been amazingly fast, reliable and they’ve normally told me about downtime (and fixed it!) before I notice it’s happened. Literally, there is nothing I can fault Slicehost on at this time which makes me very, very happy! I think my only complaint is that they are based in the USA – if they could copy their infrastructure to a data center in the UK, I would be very keen to move just because of the geographic aspects and the benefit that has on SEO.

I think the only drawback of using Slicehost is the fact that you may need a bit of experience with Linux based operating systems and shell access to be able to get your server doing something of use. When I started I had a basic understanding of using Linux from the command line (basic move, delete, copy, rename type operations) and some experience of configuring Apache web servers, but beyond that very little. Luckily, Slicehost have some great tutorials that walk you through every stage of the process, from installing your web server of choice (Apache2 FTW!) to adding scripting and database support, even more complex things like securing the box and configuring firewall rules. By following their tutorials I was able to get a fully functional LAMP stack up and running in less than half a day. I’ve done it again a couple of times since (just for fun!) and now have the time down to under an hour!

If you are interested in giving Slicehost a try after reading my review, please use this link as I’ll receive a little bit of credit on my account for the referral

I’m still using Namesco for my domain name registration as they are located just around the corner from me in sunny Worcester and I find their services to be quick and efficient and their DNS administration panel is nice and easy to use. Everything I need really!