I know I’m going to outgrow my current shared hosting plan someday, so I figured I might as well be prepared for that eventuality. While I don’t want to go and pay 4-5 times the monthly rate I’m currently paying before I absolutely have to, it makes sense to have already done your research.
I came across the two hosts by chance, by reading an up and coming design blog (Usability Post). Noting the fast load times, I decided to see who the host was. There was a little Slicehost logo in the footer, so I clicked through.
The Slicehost homepag loaded quickly, and the clean theme greated me. The page advertised affordable VPS plans, ranging from $20/mo to $280/mo, along with a list things included in every plan. Slicehost promises
- Full root access
- The ability to reboot the VPS
- A selection of distro choices
- “4-core servers running Xen virtualization instances”
- RAID-10 Array
- “Guaranteed CPU share and more when available”
The starting plan, at $20 per month, offers 100GB of transfer and ten gigabytes of storage, with 256MB of reserved RAM. Their numerous packages increase fairly slowly in price (the second level, with twice as much of everything, is only $18 more per month than the first plan), and have plenty of options to suit your needs. Need 4GB of RAM and 1.6TB or transfer (with a full 160GB of disk space)? It’ll cost you, but you can have it.
So I decided to do some research into Slicehost, to see just how reputable they were. I did some Googling, and checked Webhosting Talk, like anyone should do to get an idea of a host’s customer satisfaction. While I was doing that, I came across Linode.
Linode is a similar service to Slicehost. Their site didn’t come up quite as fast as Slicehost’s for me, but respectable nonetheless. They have very similar offerings to those of Slicehost, though Linode’s plans are different. Their base plan has 360MB of RAM, 12GB of storage, and 200GB of transfer; all for $19.95/month. Linode even tells you how many of each plan are available at the moment.
Both companies look really good, and they seem to have fairly clean track records. I’ve had problems digging up any dirt on either. The best I’ve really found is that Linode’s achille’s heel is disk usage; apparently disk access is the real slow-up on their machines. And really, it doesn’t seem all that bad. Their VPS rigs seem snappy enough for most purposes. Both companies have loyal followings, and pretty good customer satisfaction.
I think I’ll probably be going with one of these services when 1&1 decides I’m using too much of what they sold me. I’ve considered Media Temple, but they don’t offer quite as much. I don’t know. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of time yet to decide.
A word of caution: Slicehost and Linode don’t offer any graphical control panels like cPanel or Plesk. They have something for managing the VPS, and that’s about it. They expect you to make use of your root access to do what you need to do (though you could install cPanel if you were to buy a license). Hopefully I’d be up to the challenge if I ended up on one of their servers.
Pingback: A Brief Review of Slicehost | b(rio)log
Pingback: Pros and Cons About Slicehost and Linode | b(rio)log