While this blog is currently hosted at Dreamhost, I do have some aspirations for an uptime ratio of closer to 100%.  It seems like they don’t monitor servers there and when yours is down it takes submitting a ticket and a lot of patience.  When looking for a new host, I wanted something more.  I searched around for a while and found SliceHost on the Nuby on Rails blog.  I saw the review there along with the comments and I did some more research online.  The only negative comments I could find seemed like people who didn’t understand how to use a shell.   They have very reasonable rates and I got on the waiting list for the 256Slice.  After a few days of waiting, I was invited to sign up.

Before I could get a chance to work on my Slice, a friend asked me to set up a Slice for multi-site hosting.  This week has been a crash course in Linux software installation and configuration.  The speed of the server connection is excellent.  It doesn’t really take long to download or install anything.   I started out with an Ubuntu 6.06 OS and started working from there.  My first attempt failed miserably (building Apache from source proved more difficult and less reliable than just using the apt-get package) and that’s where this review really takes shape.

I had questions and needed answers.  I checked out the wiki and didn’t find what I needed so I went to the chatroom.  Jason and Matt hang out there a lot and they are extremely professional and courteous.  Even when I had what seemed to be silly questions, they were right there to answer it or point me in the right direction.  I was shocked.  This is the first time where I feel like I’m actually getting support from a hosting company.  I’ve had quite a few hosts in the last 8 years, and most of them had support that ranged from the mediocre to the terrible.

This was my first week of dealing with SliceHost, but so far I am very impressed.  If you need a Linux VPS, I would urge you to at least try them out for a week or two.

Jim Losi, Visual Developer – Visual C# MVP Candidate 2007

For both new and experienced developers, Jim Losi has been a tremendous resource for guidance and assistance within the .Net community. Jim has assisted me personally via forum post, a code sample, a note of confidence, debugging a project, or contributing a library when needed. I have witnessed Jim help countless others on the LearnVisualStudio.Net forums as well in the same manner. Jim lives on the other side of the country from me and as such I am surprised to be able to get a hold of him in the late hours of the night and the early hours of the morning.

Jim remains steadfast in his dedication to ensure that those who ask him questions understand the answers and he encourages those individuals to continue the cycle and help each other. Jim consistently assists others in a professional and friendly manner and demonstrates a level of commitment to others rarely seen within the .Net community.

Jim has worked very hard to help many of us out in the community and has never asked for anything in return. He is a colleague, a mentor, and an example for the community at large. Jim Losi is the ideal candidate for Visual Developer – Visual C# MVP.

Jim Losi has been a great influence to me in the last year and a half and ‘m really hoping Microsoft recognizes him this year for all of his hard work. If you have a testimonial for Jim as well, please forward it to me and I’ll make sure it makes its way to Microsoft by way of Bob Tabor / LearnVisualStudio.Net.

Rob and Eric have already released a second beta for SubSonic 2.0.

I introduced a colleague to SubSonic yesterday and found myself telling her how much faster I can get an app out the door because I don’t have to build a custom data access layer. I felt like I was telling her a secret…

Today Rob and Eric pushed out the latest SubSonic offering to the general public.  There are tons of new features and a great list of what’s in store over at Rob’s blog.  I could swear that Phil actually announced it before I saw the change on Rob’s Blog.  He’s psychic or something…..

Like a couple of aging heavyweight fighters, Java and Microsoft have been slugging it out in the enterprise web application market for some time now. It seems like the fight continues round after round with no real winner in sight. But there have been some very interesting things happening in the last month that seem to indicate that the conditions may be right for Ruby on Rails (RoR) to slide in take some of the “Enterprise” market share.When I refer to “Enterprise” I am most certainly pointing at the plethora of programming shops where they’re sticking to ASP.Net or JSP and Servlets. I have worked in the former for the last 8 years and have worked with external vendors and service providers that were the latter. Many of the platform discussions came down to the same points. Funny thing is, they seem similarly bloated at times for solving some of the same everyday problems. If you want to see a good comparison of Ruby to C# (Java guys will feel at home too), check out Softies on Rails.

For the Java environments, JRuby has hit another milestone and they are confident enough to hang it out there for RoR developers to give it a shot. Building a Ruby interpreter on Java instead of C allows you to extend the Java classes, deploy Rails applications to a web server as a WAR file, and provide similar portability to RoR as Cold Fusion enjoys.

For the Microsoft environments, the IIS Team announced they have implemented Fast CGI for IIS 7. This will make RoR on IIS more efficient and easier to deploy. Rob Conery has the drop on this as well as instructions for how he was able to make this work. Rob is the founder of a framework for .Net inspired by Rails called SubSonic and if you write ASP.Net 2.0 applications, you need to take a look.

Both of these recent events seem to indicate that in organizations that already have a significant amount of infrastructure built up in either Java or .Net will not have to do much at all to make Rails run in the same environment. I think this will lead to greater adoption because it will be faster and easier to deploy and configure, making it an easier sell to your development manager, VP, etc., or for you to sneak it in.

I received my Joost invite today and signed up. It was a very simple download and install. The first time you run the program it allows you to create a Joost account and then access the software. Once you get in, it’s a very cool looking U.I. It was very easy for me to get around and find content.

A more detailed evaluation is in order here, so I will gladly take one for the team and watch some T.V. on my PC for the next week and let you know how it turns out.