Slicehost

Yikes! It’s been way too long since our last podcast. Part of the gang was in San Antonio this week and Paul demanded we knock one out. We cover a bunch of topics, including Cloud Servers, what everyone’s been up to, some customer questions and more. Intro is ‘Here’s the Thing’ by Girl Talk and outro is ‘Ulysses’ by Franz Ferdinand. Enjoy!

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Welcome Robert Scoble to the Rackspace team! His new project is Building 43, here’s more info on what he’ll be doing. We hope to have Robert talk with some Slicehost customers soon!

You may have noticed this post from our sister company Mosso. The announcement has generated some questions about Slicehost which we want to address.

We promised that Slicehost wouldn’t change after the Rackspace acquisition and that is still 100% true. We continue to offer Slices which include bundled and pooled bandwidth, predictable pricing, great support, a legendary articles database and a lively community.

Cloud Servers is a separate Rackspace product offering that works as a utility service with hourly billing. The pricing does not include bandwidth (a question that keeps coming up). The entry-level support is similar to ours with an option for upgrading to phone support. For more details, check out the Cloud Servers page.

We have a podcast coming out soon and a ton of stuff to discuss. The team is pumped to be with Rackspace and delivering what we always have – Slices with a big dollop of Slicehost Love!

Do pop by our chatroom or email if you have any questions, we’d love to get your feedback.

We’ve been asked every year and can finally say: Yes! Slicehost is going to SXSW! Just a hop, skip and a jump away from Rackspace HQ in San Antonio, we’ll be hanging out at the Interactive portion of the event.

Here’s the lowdown:

- Rackspace will setup shop for the Trade Show at the Convention Center on Saturday, Sunday and Monday (12-6p). We’ll have people onsite answering questions, handing out schwag and most importantly, VIP passes to the party.

- We’ll be demoing at the Accelerator event on Monday at the Downtown Hilton (10a-5p), emceed by blogger extraordinaire Guy Kawasaki.

- We’re all headed to the Rackspace Cloud Party on Monday at Brush Square Park (4p). Food, drink and geekery will abound, so please swing by! Email me to get on the guest list or stop by the Rackspace booth.

Those are the official events, but we all know the best times are the random meetups around town. We’ll be tweeting and would love to hang out with Slicehosters.

Twitter: follow @slicehost or my personal account @zenmatt

Email for the guest list: matt @ slicehost

If you’re headed down, please get in touch. We’re SXSW noobs and could use your tips. See you in Austin!

Wednesday night (March 4), starting around 5:30-6pm at the 21st Amendment. I’ll be there, Lew Moorman from Rackspace and lots of Slicehosters. Join us if you can!

I’m in Seattle for Cloud Camp this Saturday. If you’re attending (sold out), grab me and say hello. Customers/customers-to-be/techies in the neighborhood shoot me a note (matt AT slicehost) or a tweet (@slicehost) and we’ll meet up. From there I’m headed to San Francisco for meetings, the same offer applies!

Last fall we eliminated the prepayment bonus when we lowered prices on bigger slices. Since then, there’s been a steady stream of pleas in our suggestion box to reinstate it. Ask and ye shall receive – the bonus is back in effect! To get it, make a payment that is the greater of 6x your current monthly bill or $240.

Examples:

Monthly bill: $20 – a payment of $240 or more to get the 10% bonus

Monthly bill: $70 – a payment of $420 or more to get the 10% bonus

We hope this helps people making annual payments on a business credit card or those of you managing your own customer projects on Slicehost. Enjoy!

The Slicehost team keeps growing and I’ve got a backlog of blog hazing!

First, we seemed to have missed welcoming Ant, who’s been doing all sorts of systems and backend magic since the Rackspace deal last fall. He’s in San Antonio and you Debian lovers have him to thank for getting Lenny slice-ready in addition to getting the DFW datacenter live.

Joining Ant as an allstar Linux ninja is Major, a Racker who moved over full time to our team. He does all the hard work around here and “Ask Major” is a popular phrase in the office.

Two new folks on the midnight shifts: Adam slid over from Rackspace and Alan is here in St. Louis. You night owls will find them manning SliceChat and drinking unsafe amounts of Red Bull and coffee. Stop in and wake them up, I mean say hello.

Jon is our new data center guy here in STL, you won’t find him in SliceChat because he’s always tinkering in the DC and keeping those machines purring.

Lastly Ismail and Demond are 2 new day-shifters in St. Louis. Ismael is armed with a shiny new Masters in CS and speaks fluent Turkish for those of you that like to learn new languages via Linux troubleshooting. Demond started this morning, so we’ll take it easy on him :)

A big welcome to all the new Slicers!

Debian 5.0 was released earlier this week and it’s now available for all of your Slicehosting needs. A big thanks to Ant for his hard work getting it prepped for production. Enjoy!

Hook’em Horns! Gig’em Aggies! How ‘bout them Cowboys! Texas forever!

I’ve run out Texas propaganda, but am delighted to announce that slices are live in the Rackspace Dallas datacenter. We’ve been working hard on this since the announcement last October and it’s a big step for us. First, a huge thank you to all of the Rackers who helped turn up the new facility, they’ve been awesome and completely top-notch. Second, we are pumped to offer customers geographically diverse options for backup/redundancy/load-balancing purposes. Third, we have plenty of room to grow in the new facility and are working harder than ever on geeky goodies you are sure to love.

Now what does this mean? Q&A below.

Q. Where are your datacenters?

A. We have 2 facilities in St. Louis (STL-A and STL-B) and now DFW-1.

Q. Where are new customers going?

A. New customer are going to DFW-1, previously they went to STL-B.

Q. Where do slices go when I add them?

A. Additional slices are automatically added to your local/default datacenter.

Q. Can I pick where a new slice is built?

A. Not at the moment. If you’d like to add slices in a datacenter other than your default, just contact support and we’ll do it for you. DFW-1 is a great option for those of you in STL that require geographic diversity for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Q. Can I move existing slices to DFW-1?

A. Not automatically. You’ll need to contact us to build a new slice in DFW-1, then rsync data from the old slice.

Q. Can I create a new slice in DFW-1 from a backup in STL?

A. Not at the moment, but we are working on solutions.

That’s all for now, if you have any other questions please let us know. As always thank you for your support!

Just a quick heads up that we will be performing switch upgrades that will affect a portion of the STL-B data center.

Customers may see brief network hiccups as the upgrade takes place.

The maintenance window is Friday January 30, 0600-0700 GMT.

The maintenance is not expected to impact Slices but Slicehost support will be in the chatroom relaying updates and assisting with any issues.

Let us know if you have any questions.

UPDATE: Maintenance completed.

Just a reminder, I’m in San Francisco this week and would love to meet up. I’ll be at Ritual Roasters this afternoon for a few meetings, swing by if you’re in the neighborhood. Tomorrow afternoon I’m around Hayes Valley and will tweet my location. Shoot me an email (matt AT slicehost) if you can make it!

I’m headed to Mountain View, California this week for Cloud Connect. We’ll be talking all things Slicehost at the Speed Geeking and Chalk Talk portions of the conference and I’ll be joined by EJ from Cloud Files and Adrian from Cloud Sites. Please stop by and grab me if you’re at the conference.

If you can’t make it to the conference, I’d still love to get together with Slicehost customers and customers-to-be. I’ll be around the Silicon Valley area until Friday morning and will be heading to San Francisco the following week. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks – bring your techie friends I’ve got the Amex card :) Shoot me an email (matt AT slicehost) or call (314.266.3502) to set something up. Be sure to follow our twitter feed as I’ll post any impromptu meet-ups.

The free version of Mike Mayo’s Slicehost iPhone app has finally been approved by Apple and is available now at the App Store. The $1.99 Pro version has been out since late December and allows you manage multiple accounts via the API. There’s been a great response to the app, check it out and let Mike know what you think.

Mike’s post on the free version

Check out a couple of cool tools popping up from the Slicehost community.

SliceMonitor – a Slicehost widget for OS X by Ludwig Pettersson

Mike Mayo is working on an iPhone app for managing your Slices

Both of these use our API and we love seeing what people can do with it. If you have any suggestions or a tool you’re working on, let us know!