Slicehost

The 3-way handshake episode 7 is ready for your listening pleasure. SuperJared joins us from San Diego. We talk about his role at Slicehost, capistrano articles from Paul, Slicehosters getting dugg, drama in the Rails community and Macworld.

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I’m sure everyone and their brother saw these 2 sites last week, given that they were on digg, reddit, delicious and the Hacker News feed at yCombinator. In case your browser was broken and you missed it:

thesixtyone is an awesome new music site allowing users to vote songs onto the front page. They have a great interface for playing songs instantly. Plus the cool VH1 styke pop-ups keep you entertained. James and Samuel survived a massive digg and had a great week of publicity.

Dominiek also hit the front page of digg with his article Building a .com in 24 hours. He walks through the day long process of building Wigitize and people went nuts over the details and new site. There are even updates during and after the traffic wave describing the experience.

Congrats to thesixtyone team and Dominiek!

People have been asking for waitlist updates: surprise, surprise – it’s been non-existent for over a week! We’re happy to be caught up and hope to stay that way. Prepayments remain in place ranging from 3-12 months. Feel free to snag your slice at will and thanks to those who waited patiently during the previous months.

Happy holidays – our last episode of 2007. Pickled Onion joins us from the UK, a few updates and some banter.

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Datacenter 1 will have a network maintenance window Friday Dec. 14 between 0601-1200 GMT. At this time, BGP configurations will be modified and BGP sessions moved to the new core (which we were physically moved to last week). The expected impact is momentary outages affecting some customers as BGP updates propagate, with most of these changes taking place between 0700-1000 GMT. We’ll be available in the chatroom during the window. As always please contact us with any questions.

We’re working on lots of little things as we close out 2007:

• Today Arch Linux was added to the list of OS options. We’ve received several requests for Arch and it’s a good choice for power users.
• The mobile version of SliceManager has also been updated, be sure to bookmark it for stats gathering and reboots via the road.
• The bandwidth alerts are now emailed when you hit 80% of your Slice’s limit in order to provide lead time.

Today we’ve enabled a few notifications for Slicehosters. These are sent to the customer email addresses, not the billing email addresses.

Swap

The first notification is about swap usage. We’re monitoring pure I/O on each Slice’s swap partition, and if it exceeds our current threshold (subject to change) you’ll receive an email. This will hopefully let you know that the slice is using more swap than it should. This is bad because using excessive swap will degrade performance dramatically. You have a 3-day threshold to rectify the situation before you are emailed again.

We’ll follow up next week with some ways to tackle swap usage on your slice.

Blocklist

This monitor watches the IPs we provide on 2 Spam Blocklists with more to come soon. The email you receive gives a link to the Blocklist website. There you will find information on how to remove your IP(s) from that list.

Bandwidth Overage

You shall receive this notification the day you go over your bandwidth allotment. There is no change in service, but you will be charged an extra $0.30 (USD) per extra gigabyte of transfer.

Datacenter 1 is in the final stages of moving us to a new core network and we’ll be moved this Friday Dec 7 between 0700 and 0900 GMT. There will be a network outage of 5-10 minutes during this window as we are physically moved onto the new network. We’ll be in the chatrooms during the window. As always we apologize for this downtime, but ultimately it should result in a more stable network.

No turkey-day hang-overs at Slicehost. Jared and I have added a couple of new (and oft requested) features over the holiday weekend.

Named Backups

We’ve reworked the backups a bit based on a lot of good feedback. The backup service will now consist of three backup “slots”. If you want daily/weekly scheduled backups those will occupy two of the available slots, leaving a third spot for a backup of your choosing. If you would prefer to not have a daily or weekly, you could opt for additional named backups.

Building New Slices From Backups (AKA cloning)

So let’s say you’ve saved a named backup called “my perfect slice” and would like to be able to crank out a couple of brand new slices based on that image. In the “system image” drop-down on the Add Slice page you’ll notice that you now have an option to select any backups of your other slices for creating new slices. It’s as simple as that. Note that the root password, network configs, and ssh host keys will be regenerated for each install based on a backup.

First one since the big rewrite. It’s short but we give updates on the new backend, new team members, the waitlist and more.

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Credit cards are the only form of payment we accept and occasionally this causes problems for customers (usually international). Paypal is the most often requested alternative and it looks like they have a new solution that could be of interest to our customers. They are set to announce a virtual credit card product tomorrow which generates a usable Mastercard number that deducts directly from your Paypal account. Initial reports describe this as an installed software package that works with your browser, so compatibility with OS X and Linux remains to be seen. However, it could be a great one-time payment option for folks who’d prefer to setup a Slicehost account without using a credit card.

We’re through all of the 6, 12 and 24 month prepayments and into the longest outstanding reservations (3-months). Moving at a very quick pace, so if you’re still waiting it will be coming your way soon. If you’re just getting onto the list, 6-month and up should be same day sign-up.

Network maintenance will be performed on Friday Nov 16 at our first datacenter from 0600-1100 GMT. Expected impact will be momentary network outages as traffic is migrated to the new core from 0700-1000 GMT. This should be one of the last major maintenance events as we move onto the new core at this facility. We’ll be online during the window. As always, please contact us with any questions.

No nightclubbing for us this Saturday night, instead we completed an emergency maintenance – upgrading firmware in all of our switches to circumvent a bug that started popping up. You shouldn’t have noticed any downtime, this was done between 0500 and 0700 GMT at both datacenters.

A couple of weeks old, but I wanted to mention SysAdmin’s Chronicles extensive review of Slicehost and the new SliceManager . It covers interacting with a Slice and has several great screenshots. A great article for people considering our services.