Slicehost Review
Slicehost is a Virtual Private Server hosting provider. The term VPS has been used to describe many different service offering before, so let me clarify: Slicehost is a Xen instance provider. Xen is a hypervisor system that allows virtual machines to run on a host at near native speeds and with dedicated resources. Unlike other solutions, there is no "host" operating system that is between your virtual system and the hardware, just a lightweight piece of running code to control access to the hardware. This makes for a better virtual machine environment, in my opinion.
I've been with Slicehost for several months. Currently, it hosts backup services for things like mail and dns. It also gets an updated copy of the web sites everyday, although there is no mechanism in place in the Tinkergeek network to do automatic failover should my main server die. My future plans might include load balancing (the videos on younts.org and the gallery here take up a decent amount of bandwidth).
I have not experienced any major down time with Slicehost, and an admin can almost always be found in their IRC channel. It's not "professional" support, but they don't aim to please corporations. Their goal is to provide service to "developers", or in other words "geeks". They don't provide an SLA, just a promise to do their best. So far, their best has been a lot better than UnixShell!
One down side is that you can't partition up your allocated file space. It's all given to you at once. So, if you want to do encrypted block devices or such, you get stuck creating large files in your single file system. This isn't necessarily a show stoper, but it'd be nice to have.
Update, November 25, 2007:
It has now been several more months since I wrote the original review. I am still very happy hosting a machine with the Slicehost folks. Since I first opened my account with them, they have changed how they sell resources. It appears they are under a lot of demand for their service and there is a backlog of account requests. These days, you have to prepay for some length of service and that prioritizes your request for an account. (Longer prepaid service gets you a virtual machine quicker.) This, to me, seems like a much better choice than raising their prices to curve demand. In any case, I would still highly recommend them.
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