The great thing about Slicehost was the size. They were big enough to be reliable but small enough to give a shit when you had a question on #slicehost on freenode.
PickledOnion's posts on the Slicehost articles page were top notch. I hope the quality continues.
It got to the point that I'd only recommend Slicehost, after a few bad experiences with media temple and the like.
I mentioned how I plan to switch from Slicehost to Amazon in a twitter msg and they replied offering me any help I needed. I see that they are monitoring their name across social sites. I was impressed.
I hate to be a content-less "ditto", so let me only highlight that this comment represents a LOT of people's views. They were always very responsive (hell, direct support in IRC!) and it would be a shame to lose that. But it's a big field out there, and I (and I bet most) have no problem walking away if things go poorly under new management.
I'm also disturbed that this hasn't been communicated any way besides a blog post. You have my e-mail address: let me know! This shouldn't be surprise I find when I'm on HN. I log into my server regularly: I don't visit your blog every day. IMHO, off to a less-than-stellar start.
That's not fair. I'm not a Slicehost--uh, Rackspace customer, but if I was, I have more than enough stuff in my newsreader that I wouldn't want to subscribe to their blog.
Now I'm just waiting for GitHub to be acquired by SourceForge so another one of the companies I love doing business with can fall in the hands of one I'm trying to avoid like the plague.
On a business note, congratulations. On a personal note I'm not looking forward to this acquisition. For one I like the current price model, which is very reasonable. Rackspace is extraordinarily expensive. In my experience the customer service from the small slice host team is fantastic. I usually send a support email and receive a response within an hour. Hopefully we dont end up with account managers now.
Just got back from the Rackspace Cloud event in Austin and was pleasantly surprised to say the least. Lanham (CEO) came by and talked with us at length... very genuine about delivering a fanatical experience for Mosso, and it's very evident to me that they're putting a lot of beef behind that statement. Looking forward to migrating to Mosso soon...
I was also suprised by how bad mosso was when I tried it a few months ago. Slicehost is such a great breath of fresh air compared to it.
Case in point: mosso's control panel rarely worked. Not once did I manage to see a list of my databases. But look at slicehost's control panel. It is by far the best I've seen, and believe me I've seen many.
I've been using mosso for about 6 months, and I am surprised that I haven't found something to bitch about yet. I've never experienced that database problem, but the few problems I have come across have been dealt with quickly through their 24/7 chat support.
I love Slicehost, and have received nothing but great service and support from them. Their articles are indispensable, and their control panel is simply world class.
What I dislike is Rackspaces shady pricing practise, the fact that whenever I've dealt with Rackspace as I've come away with quotes that were wildly excessive, and generally the view that Rackspace are a large company focused on new sales through hard-selling practises rather than focusing on customer service and their existing customer base.
To me, Rackspace are the most-reputed of a very bad bunch (the best of the worst). Slicehost are the shining star of a new breed (the best of the best).
As a Slicehost customer I really do not want to see Slicehost become anything like Rackspace, at all. Instead I want to see the opposite, Rackspace become more like Slicehost. But will that happen? Well... did the Slicehost guys get Rackspace board seats? There's your answer.
I'll wait and see, but whilst I had loyalty to Slicehost and the people there I won't feel loyalty towards Rackspace. Should I feel any affect on the service I receive, through price increase, impact on backups, downtime, etc... I'll jump.
As others have said: DON'T FUCK IT UP, RACKSPACE.
Not least because with this many entrepreneurs here with growing ventures, it might not be the wisest business decision to piss them all off.
Let's hope they don't do to Slicehost what they did to Webmail.us after acquiring them. If they do, you can expect huge increases in prices and a focus more on corporate/"big" clients.
We cut the prices of our 2GB and larger slice offerings, along with announcing IP failover, and removing the mandatory 3-month prepayment on signup.
[edit]
Oh, and cause we keep forgetting to announce it. If you have private IP addresses on any of your slices, new slices will automatically get built with a private IP.
I've been on 2 dedicated servers with Rackspace for a year now and have no complaints, there service has been very good thus far and their rates were very competitive.
This is one of the big reasons I did not give Rackspace a second look. If you're price is not in plain view I assume you're too expensive. I have no idea why companies do this.
So when you ask for pricing information, you get a call from a account manager, who helps you find what you need and offers a price.
For instance if you need a server to do your email there are a lot of options and solutions to choose from, managed server or exchange mailboxes.
Ofcourse at that moment they'll try to sell you some more, like file hosting, terminal services etc...
It's just not a plan A, B and C with options x y z company.
And I don't want that. I know how to build/manage stuff, so I want to know how much it costs to have a server there. The less they have to do, the better for both of us - the only thing I need them for is to kick the hardware if it has a problem.
You can tell your customer rep that. I'm sure he will oblige.
They just want to talk to you to get everything set up like you want/need it.
How much memory does your server need? Need a backup solution? How bout an apc module? What are the bandwith requirements, do you need multi or single gigabit lines? Like I said, their business works more on a case by case basis instead of select a, b or c and proceed to checkout.
I'm not saying you have to join them, but they're a good, solid serviceprovider.
Yeah, I don't want that crap, and view it as being annoying. Other people might find it necessary, or worth their money, so I don't think it's bad, it's just not for me.
I was thinking of getting a slice with Slicehost, but now I'm not so sure. I guess it's too early to tell what will happen.
If you read "Included with Every Cloud Server" it reads just like the Slicehost homepage including this gem: "Slicehost management portal for reboots and software installs".
I'm wondering whether Rackspace will keep around the Slicehost brand (ala HP/Compaq) or just put everything under the Mosso brand. I am excited for the possibility of an S3-like storage system under the same roof as Slicehost. Maybe Amazon will start thinking of making lower-powered EC2 instances to compete with Mosso?
I've used both Rackspace and Slicehost in production settings, and they both have their drawbacks and advantages.
We moved to the 'premiere rails hosting provider' (I won't say which one, but it's the current one, not the old one) and after moving to their 'managed' environment I realised that the grass isn't always greener.
Rackspace were not able to manage our application, but it's been more effort having to manage the managers so to speak, verify everything they did, and now we have a significantly more complicated setup.
In short, trying not to go off topic, I found Rackspace to be quite damn good at what they did (hardware, and provisioning). I could get a new box up and going in 24-48 hours with them, built to my specifications and sealed and delivered. The current premier provider take 'up to a week' to provision us a new VPS web slice, go figure.
My company's beta testing app is hosted at SliceHost. I'm happy for the SliceHost guys but given Rackspace's reputation I was not very happy with this acquisition. Maybe it's cuz I'm afraid SliceHost might lose it's small tech company service...
Where does this bad reputation thing come from, this thread is the first I've ever heard of rackspace having a bad reputation.
I've used them with two different companies, and in my experience they are nothing short of excellent. Yes their managed service cost is quite high, but its worth every penny if you want to sleep well at night.
Is a slicehost slice considered 'cloud computing'?
Scoble and others are comparing slicehost to EC2 and amzn web services, but doesn't slicehost compete more with traditional dedicated hosting and other vps providers?
Exactly. Their API for me is the distinguishing factor that means I can build SaaS-based offerings on top of them, and at a more affordable rate than EC2 as well. You don't necessarily need the horsepower of a full 24x7 EC2 instance, and a basic $20/mo slice can do a lot.
I really like the guys at slicehost. They can answer all your technical questions in a few short sentences. They are pretty quick and responsive. Hope Rackspace uses these skills along with their servers.
Probably because they have incredible support, an amazingly simple interface and programmatic access. They've obviously built a great reputation among developers.
PickledOnion's posts on the Slicehost articles page were top notch. I hope the quality continues.
It got to the point that I'd only recommend Slicehost, after a few bad experiences with media temple and the like.
DON'T FUCK IT UP, RACKSPACE.