February 17th, 2010
New Slice sizes, price changes and bandwidth increases
I am very pleased to announce the start of some major changes and improvements to the Slicehost product.
2010 is going to be a very exciting year for us and I hope you will join us for an amazing year.
New Slice Sizes
Let's start with the new Slice sizes. Although upgrading a Slice is done with a click of a button and is usually complete within a few short minutes, one of the issues was having to double the Slice size. For example, from a 256Slice, the next available option was a 512Slice. This can mean a significant jump in resources and in how much you pay each month.
So to help with a smoother, more consistent upgrade path we are very pleased to offer our new 'Intermediate Slices'. They sit nicely between our most popular Slice sizes. We have introduced a 384Slice, a 768Slice, a 1.5GB Slice and a 3GB Slice.
The prices of the new Slices will also allow for an easier resize path - the new Slices start at just $25.
Bandwidth Increases
As you may know, we have pooled bandwidth across Slices since Sep 2008 but what if you don't have multiple Slices? Well, we agree you shouldn't have to worry about bandwidth overages so we have significantly increased the bandwidth usage for each Slice size.
You can view full details for all of the plans on offer on the main website: http://www.slicehost.com
Professional Services
There are also many requests from customers who would like help in setting up their Slice(s). Although there are many very able techs in the community who have done an outstanding job, we wanted to make this easier by offering another option. As such, we will also be introducing Rackspace Professional Services later this week. This allows you to hire professional, Rackspace Linux Sysadmins and Techs to install whatever you like on your Slice. Want a multi-Slice, load balanced, Nginx setup? No problem. Want a simple LAMP stack? No problem.
I hope you find this start to the Slicehost 2010 useful. Keep an eye out, a lot more is coming!
Cheers, Paul
February 17th, 2010 at 09:09 PM David
So this is the February announcement? I’ll pass
February 17th, 2010 at 09:10 PM Drew
Why the redesign of the site? It looks like slicehost took a step backward…
February 17th, 2010 at 09:11 PM Michael
Great news on the new slice sizes and increased bandwidth!! Thank you!
P.S I agree with Drew, the 90s called and wants it’s design back!!!
February 17th, 2010 at 09:11 PM ugh
So what changed? Linode is still cheaper. I can get a “slice” for $20 and it has more resources. Why should I pay the extra $5?
February 17th, 2010 at 09:12 PM David C
Will we see the increased bandwidth denoted on our current plans?
February 17th, 2010 at 09:12 PM Serg
Good to see more bandwidth, yey to intermediate options, I guess. Honestly, not enough to cover the reasons some of us have switched, but at least progress in some direction. Looking forward to the roadmap post later tonight.
Also, the website redesign, header and footer are okay, but oh man is the front page content section bad in comparison to the old design even.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:12 PM alan statham
Hmm, I moved all my sites to Linode. You still can’t match their prices or bandwidth or console. Competition is good!
February 17th, 2010 at 09:13 PM Ryan Townsend
Great news, shame about the site which is definitely a step back! Hope this isn’t Rackspace’s doing… their other sites are crap, they all look asif they’ve been designed by Microsoft (which also has awful designs imo).
This design fails because of many minor things that build up in to an overall fail: 1) Submit Comment button – blue text on green background – yuck! 2) The green “get your slice” button has a drop-shadow on the text seen nowhere else on the site, and why is this an image instead of standard text with border-radius for rendering consistency? You use border-radius for the navigation so why not? 3) What’s with the grey-blue bar along the top? This doesn’t match anything else, nor does the black-grey footer? 4) On the ‘why slicehost’ page, you a really low line-height on the heading “when you choose slicehost…” 5) the blues on the site are pretty much random between the the nice calm blue of the Slicehost logo, the bright blue seen in the footer (which has come from where?), and the darker blue used for headings. 6) Oh wait, the blog doesn’t apply that colour scheme either, that has black titles and green headings? 7) Whoever designed the image on the homepage (http://www.slicehost.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/vps-hosting-bg.jpg) should be shot. 8) Totally inconsistent use of font-size. There shouldn’t be such a range of big to small – body text at 16px with some 11px text (e.g. in this form) means that if I increase text size, the body goes massive.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:14 PM David C
@David C Looks like I answered my own question, I do see the listed bandwidth on my account compared to the listed specs on the home page.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:14 PM Tim Fehlman
WOW! By the reaction that we are seeing you’d think that Slicehost killed everyone’s first born! Here’s my take on it!
1) More bandwidth at no extra cost? YAY! 2) Uglier (in some people’s opinion) website? Who cares! I’m here for the virtual servers, not the website! 3) Not as good as Linode? Debatable at best! Either work with Slicehost or don’t. There’s room enough in the market for everyone. 4) More slice options? Options are always good!
Thanks to the Slicehost team for all the time and effort that you are putting into this.
Tim
February 17th, 2010 at 09:14 PM Dave
Wow. Seriously? That’s it? The roadmap for 2010 is… seriously? You just don’t get it. Read what your customers want, you haven’t touched on any of the requests.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:15 PM Chris
Have to agree on the site design, it’s not that great.
But glad to see the new price schemes and increased bandwidth.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:15 PM Nic H
Good to see some intermediary options. The new site design definitely went backwards. Pretty awful in my opinion.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:16 PM ugh
@Dave – agree totally 100%. I dont give a crap about the design. A lot of folks asked for many things and yea you can’t satisfy everyone but wow. This surprised me. All the wait and anticipation from last year and this is what we got?
February 17th, 2010 at 09:16 PM Hangman
Yeah, the new design is awful. What was wrong with the old one? It was working great!
February 17th, 2010 at 09:17 PM Lee Joramo
Seems like a reasonable first step to me. Looking forward to seeing the full Road Map.
To those who say Linode is cheaper. Fine. Looks like it is a few dollars cheaper. I for one have been very satisfied with Slicehost’s service and price.
To those looking for more features, Linode still doesn’t have a backup. The single most important add-on a hosting company can provide, and Linode still hasn’t delivered backup.
If price is all you care about, why aren’t you hosting on your own box at the end of your own DSL connection?
February 17th, 2010 at 09:17 PM Eric
At least adjust your font stack on #main – I don’t have tahoma on my ubuntu box, and it’s falling back to serif.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:18 PM Jason J. W. Williams
Really happy about the new features. The site re-design really is pretty clunky. The old one was much fresher. Site design doesn’t matter to old customers…except that bringing in new customers makes our choice a safer one. :)
February 17th, 2010 at 09:19 PM Jsnod
I still would like the ability to sort slices by name, RAM, IP, backups, etc in SliceManager. It seems like such a simple request and would help those of us who have many slices to manage.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:19 PM ugh
Point taken, but my backups go offsite. Why would I want to throw my backups in the same DC let alone rack? It’s about getting our money’s worth. I won’t go broke if I had to spin off 4 “slices” if I went w/ a similar reputable provider who can offer service at cheaper prices? It’s like comcast, if you have them you would understand. I would drop them in a heartbeat for someone cheaper.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:20 PM Ryan Townsend
Okay, maybe I was a little harsh on the design, it’s not that it’s important – the Slicehost service is great and I’d buy either way, but it’s that it’s gotten worse… things should only get better. And it’s not worse in a “I hate the new Facebook because I can’t stand change” kind of way, from a web designers point of view, it’s pap, and I’d like the web to look and work as nice as possible.
Anyway, I’ve been a personal customer of Slicehost for over a year (if you include the time we’ve used them at work), the big thing for me is UK-based servers, Rackspace has a DC in London, so it can’t be far off, surely?
Linode also offers failover (I presume this just updates DNS automatically when a server is unavailable, I’m not a Linode customer, could someone clarify?), which would also be awesome. I’d love to failover a UK slice to US for even better reliability.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:20 PM FiXato
Hmm, am I going crazy? The title of the blog mentions “price changes”, so I went over to the list of plans, and surely it said $17.50 for the 256MB slice. So I was thinking: “YAY!” But then I remembered reading that the new plans would start at $25, which I thought was weird then.. I was going to write a comment about it, and when I refresh the plans list, it suddenly shows $20 for the 256MB slice again. HÆ?
So, since the blog title still mentions “price changes”, can someone enlighten me what the actual changes to the pricing are? (Apart from new plans…)
February 17th, 2010 at 09:21 PM PickledOnion
Hi,
You may have seen a cached page which used pretty random numbers so ensure the formatting worked. I apologise you saw draft information.
The new Slice sizes are at a cheaper level than the current ones would indicate – the 384Slice is at 25 and not the 29 it would have been had we kept the current price levels.
Again, apologies the cached page caused more confusion.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:21 PM gurth
I saw the same $17.50 for 256Mb too.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:22 PM Drew
I was waiting for this update before making a decision about migrating my sites elsewhere. This seals the deal. Your pricing is no longer competitive and the innovation has stagnated since the acquisition.
I don’t think anyone is being harsh about the new design, it is terrible. The old design was clean and perfect for your brand. This one is downright ugly.
I don’t know why I am surprised, I knew this day would come when I heard the Rackspace announcement. I just didn’t think it would come so soon.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:22 PM wh
Pricing still not as good as the competition, pretty disappointing. Linode is looking much better.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:23 PM Schultz
Yah the design is worse then the old one. and i still hate Slicehost’s mantra since it’s no longer true. As there performance sucks compared to the competitors. But that is marketing. I currently do backups to s3 and only spend ~ $1.50 a month for my backups. Duplicity is a awesome program. So backups is non issue for me.
So with these announcements it looks like i was right in firing up a linode account this week and starting my migration. Should be done in a few days (writing a script to automate transfering my dns information over atm)
The other thing about linode that no one has mentioned. Is that you can add RAM to your current slice. so for there 360 ‘slice’ you can purchase 90megs of ram for extra $5 a month which puts you at 450 ram for $24.95 still easily beating Slicehost. Then you can add disk storage and you can even add 100gigs of transfer at $10 increments. to a current ‘Slice’ without having to fork out the money for a larger one. So you can customize it to fit your needs exactly what you need without having to pay for extra’s you don’t need.
So pretty much slicehost was great but too little too late. Looks like IMHO the Rackspace acquisition was what i feared. It was the worst thing that could of happened. Too bad too my Slice had 580 days of uptime on it. user@web ~ $ uptime 14:33:55 up 580 days, 1:46, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
February 17th, 2010 at 09:23 PM Serg
@Paul/Pickled – a bit unclear on your comment, you said the new interim slices are cheaper than what they should be on the old price scale. So, that means that the new interim Slices are actually more bang for buck than all the old offerings? Or am I missing something?
February 17th, 2010 at 09:24 PM Ben Orenstein
Also not a fan of the new site. I hope you are at least A/B testing to see what happens to conversions.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:24 PM joey
I don’t buy that cached page story for one minute. The 256 was at 17.50 and that was not a random number – because it makes sense – just like the other prices I saw.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:25 PM Richard
Yay, complainers. I’d love to have customers like that.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:25 PM George
One of the worst redesigns I’ve ever seen.
That’s not that important to me, though. What is important is that the service is starting to look very overpriced compared to the other options. Need more RAM/CPU for the dollar, not bandwidth.
I was really happy when I found you guys. You were miles ahead then, but your competitors have caught up and passed you. Start running again.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:34 PM PickledOnion
Hi,
I think there were some fair comments regarding the site design – it wasn’t up to the standards you expect of us.
As such, we have reverted back to the old design while we continue to work on the newer one. I understand and agree with the comments that it is separate from the product itself but I do think we need to do some work on it.
Paul
February 17th, 2010 at 10:13 PM Lee Joramo
ugh,
Well for me, I want a backup as close to my live server as possible. If the server goes down and I need to go to a backup, I prefer to use slicehosts backup image from last night, and then rsync from my off-site backup to bring the new server back ASAP. I don’t want to wait for 8GB of data my paying clients data to be slowly uploaded.
I am actually simplifying the description of my real backup system. I actually have something like 5 layers of backup: on server, at the host, at a secondary host, at my office, and off line. For my needs, I consider backups at the hosting provider level a mission critical aspect of an entire backup strategy.
February 18th, 2010 at 02:59 PM Tim
@EVERYONE
Has the designed changed?
The frontpage of slicehost.com appears to be the same as it has been for the past few years.
February 18th, 2010 at 03:44 PM ugh
@Tim – Why don’t you read the comments? Two above yours.
February 18th, 2010 at 04:45 PM MrLincoln
What a bunch of crummy complainers.
What do you care what their design is? You almost never have to look at it.
Furthermore, what features have been routinely requested?
I find slicehost to be more than I imagined and much much better than our last VPS host.
If you whiners don’t like what you see, go somewhere else.
February 18th, 2010 at 05:06 PM satisfied
@MrLincoln – agreed
Slicehost – please don’t think we all agree with these whiners. Speaking as someone who runs client sites on your service, I’m more interested in reliability of service, backup capabilities and disaster recovery than saving a few bucks a month. Focus on these qualities please. Keep your chin up.
February 18th, 2010 at 05:29 PM Serg
@MrLincoln @satisfied I would almost suggest be careful who you call complainers. Some of the people who were expecting a bit more have been with Slicehost for years. It’s all great to compare Slicehost and how much better they are than budget providers, and they are, but when you compare them to competition in their segment, things don’t add up in their favour.
When a lot of the older customers joined Slicehost, we joined them because their control panel was awesome, they were one of the few VPS providers to offer monthly service (almost all do now), they had a competitive price/commodities offering (there are enough competitors that match or surpass them).
Obviously what they did was successful enough to get the purchased by Rackspace, but what was announced today, it’s a step forward, but I mostly fail to see how it directly addresses the main concerns.
And I’m still confused how the new slice offerings are basically better in terms of price/performance than the old offerings—that doesn’t even make sense.
February 18th, 2010 at 06:35 PM David
I had a lot of respect for PickledOnion until he used the words “cached random numbers” to blame for this blog that indicated that the the 256meg slice was priced at $17.50 at one time.
February 18th, 2010 at 07:12 PM ugh
To the two who told ppl to move on, yea most have and some will probably start looking. A lot of folks were looking for innovation, obviously you guys haven’t taken a marketing class to understand this. The competition keeps getting better and SH hasn’t done much to wow its current customers and/or potential customers.
All I’ve seen is just a bunch of new slices to fit in between some of the plans. I mean, the only thing SH has over its competitor is a backup plan. I for one will move off and utilize amazon s3 for backup purposes. That alone will not keep me here.
Don’t forget a lot of ppl are probably upset ever since the Rackspace aquisition. We all understood it was a business decision, so props to Matt and Jason for “cashing in,” but many of us including myself knew things would be changing around here. Only thing is, we were hoping things would change for the better.
February 18th, 2010 at 09:07 PM Abhi Beckert
Personally I find slicehost’s pricing acceptible, as someone who works at a hosting company, I don’t trust anyone with slim profit margins.
The new plans are nice, but they don’t solve the real problem: ram, disk space and bandwidth should be charged separately. I want to choose how much of each to suit my slice’s needs.
For example my personal slice has barely enough ram, not enough disk space, and way more bandwidth than I need. I’m planning to setup a new slice and expect bandwidth usage to leave me paying for ram and disk space we’re not using.
That is the reason I’m shopping around for someone else.
February 18th, 2010 at 09:20 PM Obs
@Abhi Beckert
Have you tried the http://www.rackspacecloud.com/ hosting? They charge you for how much bandwidth you use, I have a 512MB “slice” over there which only costs me $25 a month because I can keep the bandwidth low.
February 19th, 2010 at 03:25 AM Michael
Liking the changes Slicehost. Been customer for years and will remain one. Love you guys, keep up the work.
February 19th, 2010 at 07:38 PM David
Pricing that had changed w.r.t. memory/disk or even CPU was definitely what we were hoping for. You’ve been charging the same for those things for what, 2 years now?
Even leaving a EC2 box running 24/7 is a (significantly) better deal for us now than the (many) hundreds of dollars a month we’re spending with you now. The flexibility to just pay for, e.g., more RAM with Linode that someone mentioned earlier is very interesting.
While I understand the complaints about +/-$5 on a plan are not terribly exciting, hopefully you’ll heed our “we’re paying hundreds a month too much” laments while we make plans to move away. (We waited two months for the ‘big February announcement’ already) We need to scale fast in the near future, and you’re not being competitive to do that.
April 26th, 2010 at 03:29 PM green geeks coupon
Slicehost web hosting, is a very good one needless to say!
June 23rd, 2010 at 07:25 PM Leonard J
Wow, Slicehost really rocks. The changes are really exciting! I use Slicehost’s services and i recommend it to all. Thanks guys!
July 4th, 2010 at 07:59 PM Gail Turner
I work with many hosting companies and i want to say that Slice provide good service at reasonable prices. The news packs may be not ideal, but they are acceptable.Gail R. Turner