Slicehost

Hurray – we have opened the doors! A big thanks to all of our early testers. Please contact us with any questions – we’re here for you. Enjoy.

Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the life and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.

—Things you might not know about Bruce Schneier

A lot of new customers are asking how much longer. Soon!. We made some network changes this weekend to accomodate the increased demand and are polishing off the management interface. This short delay will be worth it in the long run for everyone in terms of performance. And a big thank you to our beta customers for putting up with the quirks.

We’re almost ready – a new batch of machines arrives today! In the meantime, here are a few quick snapshots of the management interface, which a people have been asking for.

Perform a reboot:

Or send us a message – we hate tickets too:

Who loves Apple? Then you’ll be interested in the new Xserve. And you might want to let us know because as Apple lovers ourselves, we’re considering Xserve hosting packages.

Our favorite framework turns 3.

So for my (delayed) celebration of Rails turning two years old, I salute all early adopters who dared stick their neck out and be the subject of ridicule from their suspicious peers.

Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake.

This looks cool.

I’ve got a modified Solaris miniroot with ZFS functionality which takes up about 60 MB (The compressed image, which GRUB uses, is less than 30MB). Solaris boots entirely into RAM. From poweron to full functionality, it takes about 45 seconds to boot on a very modest 1GHz Cyrix Mini ITX motherboard.

Thanks to 37signals, the chartroom is backup. In a geeky brush with fame, I received an email from Jason (the owner) and a comment from the man himself – DHH. We bought their book, we use all of their products and are all aboard with working smarter, not harder. However, the fact that both of these guys were working customer support on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and evening speaks volumes about their success. Thanks guys!

It appears that 37signals’ scheduled maintenance on the Campfire chat application has broken a few things. We had to flush our DNS cache this morning and it took a few hours for us to login. But now the public chatroom seems to be unaccessible. The URLs it generates for us link to error pages. Hopefully they’ll get it back up soon and we’ll see you there.

This blog started as a Wordpress install. Between us, we have a few other blogs, most Typo and a few others (Textpattern, Blogger). Wordpress seemed like a good choice and it’s always fun to try new software. I set it up, sent out the passwords and identified a few things I liked: fonts, posting UI, comment management and anti-spam techniques. But I missed Typo. Within 24 hours, I couldn’t take it anymore, wiped the install and switched.

There’s nothing wrong with Wordpress, it just wasn’t for me. It felt busy. I think it’s a great piece of software for people who quickly want to setup a blog and never look under the hood. But that’s not us.

The lack of development on the Typo front turned me off for a while, but the team has rebounded nicely with a superb 4.0 release and great install package. Much easier from the initial 2.x version I installed and highly recommended. Mongrel support built in!

Welcome to Sliceblog, the official weblog of Slicehost. We’re a Xen VPS and managed hosting company built for developers. We’ll be posting news, Slicehost events and cool info – stay tuned.