whalesalad

Slicehost is Rad, and I Don’t Even Use Them

Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago at 1:58 am. 4 comments

Like the jock at school admiring the creepy girl over in the corner (Juno reference, hah) I’ve been hiding in the shadows and observing Slicehost from the distance. Slicehost is the new kid at Hosting High, and offers VPS hosting for developers. A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is the “ultimate mix of price, performance and power” according to Slicehost, which gives you nearly all the benefits of your own dedicated machine, without the hassle and cost.

There are quite a number of popular bloggers and web developers out there who evangelize Slicehost with credit on their blogs, and it’s certainly working. So much so, that I don’t even need a VPS, and I want my own slice. Whalesalad runs on a dedicated server fully configured by me. It’s running on the blazin’ fast Nginx web server and has never suffered a moment of unexpected downtime on this machine. A great breath of fresh air from Dreamhost back in the day, and even (mt)’s grid server. Despite all of that, the thought of Slicehost powering Whalesalad sounds pretty cool in my head.

So why do I want a pice of the Slicehost pie? I’ve been marketed, virally. In three letters they’re simply rad. They offer services designed with the developer in mind, and the guys they host have nothing but killer things to say about them. They have a strong community which seems to be growing exponentially, and they give back to the entire web community with articles on everything from Capistrano to Subversion.

Every cool kid at the web designer lunch table is rockin’ a creamy portion of Slicehost goodness. Slicehost is so successful that not too long ago, I remember they had to cease fulfilling new server requests right away because they couldn’t keep up with the demand. In a world full of “Wordpress Cannot Connect To Database” shared hosting hell, Slicehost is quite the breath of fresh air. I’ll definitely be giving them a shot with some sort of project, sometime soon. That $20 a month slice is lookin’ mighty tasty.

It’s a shame their website looks like it was made by a ten year old with a CSS book on christmas morning. Hey Slicers, if you’re listening, I’d love to give redesigning your site a shot. You could surely use a sleek and sexy new site to match your explosive expansion.

Update: I’m now using Slicehost for two of my web projects and couldn’t be happier. I hope to post a review soon, but Slicehost is powering my CSS Thesis website (http://thecssthesis.com) as well as a pre-production staging server for Schoolrack.com.