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.