Slicehost

Paul pointed out this morning that several people have joined the Slicehost team and we hadn’t done the customary blog post. We did mention everyone in our video chat last week, if you missed it please give a warm welcome to:

Josh K from Wisconsin who will be working overnight support. Josh has a background in Linux administration.

Ben B from North Carolina working daytime support. Ben previously worked in software QA and Linux administration.

Ben H from Chicago working daytime support. Ben comes from a development and administration background.

Josh and the two Bens were Slicehost customers before joining and have really improved our support coverage.

We also picked up two people from Rackspace:

Mark B in San Antonio working overnight support has been with us since October. He’s been a fantastic help through this process and hit the ground running.

Sabrina G who recently moved from Texas to St Louis and has been assisting with operations. Everyone at Rackspace referred to her as a “superstar” and she’s lived up to that reputation.

They’ve been here a month or longer, but if you missed them stop by the chatroom and say hello. We’re growing fast and having fun – if you’re located in St Louis and interested in joining us, get in touch!

As promised, we’ll be doing a livechat this Thursday and answering your questions. We think this will be a fun change from the podcast and a great chance to discuss our future. We’ll be joined by Lew Moorman from Rackspace and will be broadcasting via Ustream. You can ask questions while watching the show, through Twitter or in SliceChat. We’re hoping to start around noon CST and will go for at least an hour. Please join us!

UPDATE Should start between 12-1230 today and will go as long as questions are coming in. We’ll discuss the acquisition, future plans and what’s been going on lately. You can join us in the Ustream channel or ask questions via IRC/Chat/Email/Twitter.

UPDATE 2 – Video below.

Per customer requests, we’ve added a second Twitter account (@slicehoststatus) for alerts and tech updates only similar to status.slicehost.com. Our regular Twitter account (@slicehost) is higher volume and can be used for general tweets and Q&A.

This is a precautionary notification that the local power company will be working on the community service feed for the STL-B data-center building from 0500-1200 GMT on Nov 6. During this window, we will be off utility power and running on generator power. There will be multiple representatives on hand from the power company, the building operations group, our data-center and Slicehost. We do not expect any customer impact during this window but wanted to relay the notification we received. As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

Related power maintenance in STL-B from July

Jason and I got to sit down with Robert Scoble last week before the big Rackspace event. It was such a thrill! We’ve watched countless Scoble interviews and there he was asking us questions. The video interview is online at FastCompany.tv now – check it out and let us know what you think.

What an amazing day for Slicehost and our customers! Our acquistion by Rackspace has been announced and we couldn’t be more excited. Jason and I started Slicehost two years ago and it grew beyond our wildest dreams. Selling the company was not in the cards. So what changed? A few months ago the Rackspace team invited us to talk – we couldn’t have walked away more impressed. In Rackspace, we discovered a larger version of ourselves – a hosting company passionate about their customers and the technology behind their business. As the process leading to the announcement unfolded the top notch people we encountered, along with their attitudes and knowledge of the industry, assured us we were making the right decision.

We believe that Slicehost and Rackspace are fantastic complements to each other. Our technology strengthens their position in the cloud hosting world. Their expertise, experience and resources enable us to improve our product and continue meeting our customers’ needs. Fear not loyal Slicehosters, we promise to keep doing what we’ve always done – listening to you and building a product that solves your problems. Now we have one of the largest and most respected names in the industry standing behind us. So please join us in celebrating this announcement, but not for too long. We’ve got to get back to work and have big plans ahead. As always, please send us your thoughts and questions. Thank you for your support!

Rackspace Slicehost FAQ

Jared recently posted his thoughts on the Slicehost Summit. Several great pictures are up, the result of him creeping around like a ninja snapping shots when we least expected it.

We’re growing our support team and Slicehost customers happen to be some of the best talent around! If you love Linux, working on your slice and sharing what you’ve learned with others, this is THE job for you.

What does the Slicehost support team do?

• communicate with customers via email, chatrooms and forums
• troubleshoot system problems and customer issues
• administer and configure Linux servers
• write tutorials for the wiki/forums detailing common server and software configurations
• design proactive solutions for common/recurring problems
• research and develop new products and features
• contribute to the stability of the Slicehost community

We’re hoping to add several people and are fine with remote work. If this post made your heart beat a little faster, email us right away (jobs AT slicehost.com). You might include a resume, your Slicehost story, how you can help our team or a few of your favorite geeky things. We’ll be in touch if it looks like a match – hope to hear from you soon!

UPDATE – we got lots of greats responses and these positions are currently filled. Thanks to everyone who sent in resumes!

Our biggest podcast ever! Jason, Jared, Paul, Tony, Mike and me all in the same room. We have some feature announcements, recap Slicehost highs and lows, discuss the Slicehost summit and more. Intro music is “Player’s Club” by NWA featuring Too Short and “Time to Pretend” by MGMT.

Direct download

Subscribe to the podcast feed

iTunes link

We have a feature for larger customers called bandwidth pooling. It means that the monthly bandwidth allowance is metered against the total bandwidth of a customer’s slices. For example: 4×1024slices = 4×400GB = 1.6TB total bandwidth. As people employ multiple slices and take advantage of private IPs for communication, it made sense to enable this across the board. Today we’re pleased to announce that bandwidth pooling is a standard feature and monthly bandwidth allotments are now equal to the total bandwidth across your slices.

What a Monday morning in the Slicehost office! The legendary Pickled Onion joins us from across the pond, he’s huddled in the corner longing for a good cup of tea. Jared’s in from California and brought good weather with him. We’ll be having some fun this week and hope you can join us for dinner/drinks on Thursday evening. Plan on 8pm, probably somewhere downtown. If you can post an RSVP in the comments we’ll get a rough estimate of the crowd and will update this post with the exact time/location. Hope to see you!

730PM @ Lucas Park located at 1234 Washington Ave. Just ask for Slicehost.

We’ve been busy at work on a number updates. Along with several efficiency tweaks and small fixes, we have focused on SliceManager security. On Friday we quietly rolled out the new permissions system for the SliceManager, which allows for users to be created in one of three roles: Billing, Systems, or Admin.

Admins can create, modify, and delete users in the SliceManager by navigating to Account > Account Access. We’ve created these roles to be simple and easy-to-use. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Roles Explained

Billing–Allows user to update and modify billing information, add prepayments, and view prior invoices. May see slices from main page, but no other access to slices is granted.

Systems–Allows user to create, update, modify and delete Slices and DNS. Cannot view or modify billing information.

Admin–Unrestricted access; Can do everything in the SliceManager including modification of users and security settings.

It snuck right by us – 2 years ago last week we started taking customers. What a ride! A huge thank you to all of our customers and supporters.

This week we’re excited to add another member to the Slicehost team – Michael Bradley. He has a technology background and recently relocated to the St. Louis area after doing service work in Haiti. Mike will be working with customers via email and chat, mainly on the weekends. Stop in and say hello!

A warm welcome please for our newest Slicehoster – Matthew Sherborne. Matthew has a Linux and Python development background. He was hanging out in SliceChat helping customers when he wrote us wondering if he could get paid for it. After a few phone calls and IM sessions, we had our second international employee and first New Zealander on the team. I’d love to say Matthew’s winning personality and elite technical skills convinced us he was the man for the job, but really we just dig Bret and Jemaine! Stop by and say hello, Matthew’s manning the chatrooms and answering your emails now.