Finding a decent hosting provider was harder than I thought.
My Requirements
Its important to be clear what your requirements are otherwise you’ll end up being led by the nose :-).
I felt my needs were pretty simple/common:
- host a few Wordpress blogs: Wordpress can be quite resource intensive. I considered hosting at wordpress.com but that would limit my future flexibility (what if I wanted to add some plugins that require OS level changes?, what if I wanted to move away from Wordpress as a blogging platform?).
- be Slashdot proof! Can you tell I’m an optimist?
- have full access to my Apache logs
- freedom to install security tools and utilities of my choice
- a place where I can do whois lookups for potential domain name purchases (Domain Registrar websites log all queries and the less scrupulous ones purchase the domains you look up but don’t buy immediately making a later purchase more expensive).
- have complete control over my operating system configuration
- in the future, potentially develop and host some Django based apps
My requirements meant shared hosting was a ‘no no’. Plus I’d read too many horror stories about shared, backend databases grinding to a halt when a shared hosting neighbour ran SQL queries from hell.
The Quest
I imagined that I would ask a few friends, read some reviews (to make sure my friends experience wasn’t “unique”!) and sign on the dotted line. I anticipated it would take an hour or so. As it turned out the process was much more time consuming.
The challenge I found was reconciling the diversity of opinions out there. As soon as I found positive reviews of a provider and felt I was nearing a decision, I would stumble across some pretty bad stories from what appeared to be technically-savvy people. I had a bad case of “analysis paralysis”.
One thing that struck me was the level of unrealistic expectations. You get what you pay for in this space. But all providers have failures from time to time. They will drop the ball occasionally. For me, I look at how frequently this happens and how fast the hosting team can identify the root cause (RCA), come up with a workaround/solution and restore services.
The economics of running a hosting service mean they cannot offer perfect uptime at the price points offered and stay in business. That doesn’t mean you have to set your standards low, its more a case of being realistic.
I also care about transparency and support. I don’t have time to deal with a provider that isn’t responsive or honest about their operational issues. You want your hosting provider to be ‘in the background’ most of the time, but when problems happen you want timely status updates. From what I read, its amazing how many hosting providers choose not to do this!
After spending the entire evening trawling websites, forums, blogs and USENET, I found what I was looking for.
Why I Chose Slicehost
These are the factors that swung me:
- Slicehost is targeted at developers; i.e. a pretty demanding group :-). BTW, I’m not a developer (its not a requirement!) but I want to benefit from them trying to please a tough - but knowledgeable - crowd.
- They offer very reasonably priced Virtual Private Servers (VPS): price research showed some big differences in VPS pricing - it turned out that some providers were calling their product a VPS when in fact it wasn’t really (shared kernel). I also wanted to avoid providers that overload their physical devices. Slicehost make guarantees about how they ’slice up’ the physical resources and those met my needs.
- Good documentation: not all providers do a good job in this area - they rely on more experienced users to provide support in the forums (a bit cheeky). I think I’ve only gone to the forums once so far as their docs are comprehensive and easy to understand. They cater for a wide range of software installations.
- I like the management tools (very Web 2.0!): they were basic when I joined but fast and reliable. Since I signed up they have added more features but kept it easy to use. Slicehost clearly understand User Interface design (unlike my Domain name registrar)
- They are investing in their service - they are not standing still. The continue to develop not just the management GUI but the management API (for scripted slice management if you need that) and introduce new services.
- A Complete Backup Service: Initially I was going to skip their backup service. For 5USD a month (for their smallest slice: 256MB RAM), I thought ‘I can do it cheaper’ (e.g. backup to Amazon S3). Then life takes over and you weigh up the cost of your time to implement, monitor and fix any issues vs the price of a pre-programmed backup service that just works and its a no brainer. I can completely restore my VPS if I need to at the press of a button (in fact I can restore to 3 points in the past).
- Painless Virtual Hardware Upgrades: I can quickly add RAM and disk should I outgrow my current ’slice’.
- The reviews felt balanced. So many web hosting reviews are polarized around extremes. That tells me something about their customers (see the first bullet).
- No contract: I didn’t want to be locked-in to a long term contract. The minimum sign up period is only 3 months - beyond that you can do what you want. Thats sufficient time to get a genuine sense of how good or bad a provider is.
My Experience So Far
I signed up for a 256MB VPS in March 2008 and I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
The VPS was built and ready for use within a couple of minutes of sign-up!
Since then, not only has my VPS been up the whole time (only down when I intentionally rebooted it) but performance is excellent and I could access it the whole time (!). It feels like a ‘local’ machine in terms of interactive response (ssh) and I am accessing it from thousands of miles away. I’m really happy with it.
As I am not logged in all the time, I remotely monitor my VPS uptime and response time 24×7 and I’ve not seen anything so far to cause alarm. With zero problems or hassles, I can’t comment on their support desk (I will update this post later if/when I need their support).
Value for money wise, I feel I’m getting a bit more than I pay for with Slicehost - just don’t tell them that!
What Next?
Review the slice options at the bottom of the sign-up page.
