Hosting with slicehost

I decided to move my blog and a couple other websites I maintain to an Ubuntu 8.10 based VPS/slice at slicehost.net. For various reasons the shared hosting provider I was using wasn’t fitting my needs, specifically there was downtime and performance issues.

I choose to start with slicehost’s “256 slice” which gave me 256BM ram, 10GB storage and 100GB of monthly transfer. I opted to install Ubuntu 8.10, although there are other Linux flavors available. The install took about 5 minutes and Slicehost’s control panel allows me to rebuild my slice anytime, view stats, login to a console and much more.

Since I choose to start with the smaller 256 slice I needed to make sure I wasn’t going to max out my resources since I need to have specific applications installed to maintain my blog. I decided to go with nginx as a replacement for apache2, mysql5, php5 and postfix to handle sending mail.

It’s only been a couple days since I made the switch and so far slicehost is really working out for me.

Edit: I stumbled on Slicehost when researching Linux HA for work. Slicehost has a nice write up on using HA with multiple slices.