Two weeks ago I’ve upgraded my hosting plan with Slicehost, and it happened so easily and transparently that I doubt anyone would have notice if it wasn’t for my announcements posted on my Personal Development blog.

I’ve been with Slicehost for a bit more than half a year, and must say I’m really impressed with the service.

What is Slicehost?

Slicehost is a VPS hosting company. This means that you’re buying not a ready-made hosting package with control panel to manage your emails and websites, but instead get a slice – a virtual private server (VPS) which emulates a Linux server of your own. You get administrator’s access to this environment (root), and can install/deinstall anything you like in your virtual server.

Slices come in various sizes, specified mainly by the amount of RAM available to your virtual server. Each slice has an appropriate amount of disk space allocated too, so the bigger the slice, the more memory, CPU time, disk space and bandwidth you’re going to get.

Due to its phenomenal popularity, Slicehost is a limited service, in a way that you need to request a slice and then may have to wait for 1-3 weeks for it it become available for you.

Is Slicehost for you?

Because it’s a VPS solution, Slicehost is very good for developers and Unix administrators, but not so friendly for an average user. If you don’t know how to install and configure a Linux system yourself, you will have to buy services from someone like me. The prices for slices start at 20$/month, so paying a few hundred dollars on top of it for someone to configure it all before you can start exchanging emails and serving pages from your new hosting may not be what you expect.

VPS isn’t a basic service for the general market, but it’s a niche solution with quite a set of unique features.

Here are just a few reasons why you might consider VPS solution over a standard (shared) hosting:

Full access to your hosting environment

You get root access and can create as many users with various levels of access to your virtual server as you like. Full access means you can change any file in your hosting environment, change any permission, and install/configure practically any software – all these simple actions can be quite troublesome on shared hosting when you are on a shared hosting with a single assigned userid to access your environment.

Full customization of any service

You are free to install whatever software you like, so there’s no limitation by the pre-installed and pre-configured solutions offered by your hosting company. You can use a specific kind or version of a web server, and configure it to work exactly the way you like.

For example, to serve HTTPS traffic, you need to have an SSL certificate. It’s quite a common practice to self-sign such certificates for not-so-critical websites – you will see a warning every time you access such a website, but your traffic will be encrypted nevertheless. For shared hosting, you can’t use self-signed certificates and are required to buy them from a well-known online authority.

Predictability and reliability

That’s what I like most about Slicehost. My VPS is predictable and reliable. This means that, with proper planning, I can survive any kind of traffic. People have been known to go through successful diggs on the lowest slice available. Your website can cope with thousands of visitors an hour, and even if you go over the bandwidth limit of yours, Slicehost will not cut you off immediately, thus allowing you to fully enjoy the moments of high traffic.

Predictability comes from the idea of always having your resources pre-allocated for you. When you buy a slice with 256Mb of RAM, this means that it’s a virtual server running on a much bigger and better physical server. It could be a server with 4, 8 or even 16Gb of RAM, and many slices hosted on it. The idea is that each slice gets its share of the memory reserved. This isn’t always true for all the hosting providers, but on Slicehost you always have your resources reserved. This means that you can’t use more memory than what you paid for, but also ensures that even if all the other slices on the same physical server max their resources out, your slice will stay as happy as usual, with all the memory intact and free for its own use only.

Great support

I’ve only had a few questions (not even issues) in my time with Slicehost, and have always received almost instant support. I’ve also appreciated the announcements on Slice Blog, plenty of useful how-tos on Slice Wiki, found very helpful people on Slice Forum, and got all the help I needed from Slice Chat.

There’s one of the most advanced and friendliest ever communities around Slicehost, which means anything you’re thinking of implemented has probably been tried and excelled by knowledgeable individuals before.

Give Slicehost a try!

Like any other hosting, slices at Slicehost can be bought on a monthly basis. If you think VPS is for you, please feel free to request a slice and play with it. If you have any specific questions – don’t hesitate to ask me, and if you need help deciding whether VPS is the right solution, you’re more than welcome to contact me as well. Naturally, I’ll be able to do a full install/configuration/support of your slice should you choose to use my services.