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.

Here’s another comparison between Linux and Windows – Installing Software.

With Windows, you typically download a software package that has a graphical installer.  You click next a few times and installs.  I thought this was smooth and easy.

Now all day yesterday while installing software on Ubuntu, I was using apt-get.  Holy cow!  apt-get absolutely rocks!  With one command I can have it find, download, and install software.  Windows really needs an apt-get type of application.

I used Vista for over a week and I was not impressed. I was not particularly thrilled that when deleting some files I had to do 3 separate actions because of the Windows Defender crap. It made me feel like Windows was trying to defend itself from me. I like my operating systems subservient! I want to be in control of my computing experience. So the box that Vista lived on has started it’s conversion to a dual boot Ubuntu / XP Pro machine.

The part that burns me the most is Microsoft is huge!  They have so many developers and resources, so why is it that their OS takes 551 MB to sit idle and won’t see more than 2.8 GB of ram?  This is what the World’s Greatest software company has to offer?

As I move on into learning more about Ruby and Mono using the Ubuntu partition, I will still need the XP partition to use my RealFlight G3.5 R/C simulator and have a stable installation of Visual Studio 2005. I can not go cold turkey yet! (And as bad as their OS may be, their tools are very good.)
So far I have completed the Ubuntu partition. It took me about 3-4 hours total to install, update, and add all of the software I wanted or needed. I have installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Ruby, Java, Eclipse, MonoDevelop, Apache, PHP, MySQL 5, OpenOffice, and PHPMyAdmin.

As an interesting observation, I have had some trouble with this hardware accepting 2GB of ram and the onboard NIC operating at the right speed when using Vista and XP. I have not seen the same problems while running linux.