Hosting on Slicehost with Django
I’ve finally bit the bullet and started moving my blog to Slicehost and Django. I’d definitely recommend them. Why?
With Slicehost, you know what you’re getting: a Xen instance with dedicated RAM on a quad-core box (2 AMD dual-core Opteron 265s in my case and they’re probably using better processors now then when I signed up a year ago) with RAID1+0 drives in a real data center. You know what you’re getting. In the year that I’ve had my slice, I haven’t had any downtime (that wasn’t me restarting the box or turning Apache off). They run a tight ship, but even more than that they’re just helpful people. I’m guessing that because they run such a tight ship, they have little stress and that little stress makes them friendly. They also just have wonderful things like articles.slicehost.com which is great for Linux administration information.
So, who else is there?
Well, Joyent looks really nice. They’re about twice the price of Slicehost and running Solaris. Why did I decide against them? I signed up for one of their free Facebook Accelerators (mostly to see if I liked Solaris enough to buy one of their paid accounts which require a sign-up fee). They created my account and it wasn’t working. OK, things get borked. Well, it’s now 11 days later and they haven’t been able to fix it. Maybe they give better support to their paying customers, but it makes one wonder: how much is manual? Their signup page says, “Please note new accounts may take up to three (3) days to process.” Three days? It seems likely that someone has to manually create stuff there – and since weekends are 2 days, well, you catch my drift. By contrast, Slicehost has you up and running through an automated process in 2 minutes. Nice and all without a setup fee.
And Slicehost does have some high-profile customers. DHH, the creator of the Rails framework, uses Slicehost for his personal blog. Xen, who should know which host is good at setting up Xen instances, uses Slicehost for their blog. Those are pretty big endorsements. Smaller endorsements, but really meaningful ones for me, come from people in the Django community. Slicehost is well-respected.
I’ve also had a bunch of friends use TextDrive back when it was TextDrive (one of the two companies that became what Joyent is today). The feeling from all of them was that they really WANTED to like TextDrive – they talked the talk – but that in the end, TextDrive was just full of hot air. Unacceptable downtime, slow speeds, and custom setups that mean you run into problems.
The big reason I wanted to use Joyent was because all their Accelerators come with 10TB of data transfer. Now I’m wondering whether that is a real possibility or 10TB the way Dreamhost gives out bandwidth.
So, Joyent is out (as much as I want to like them too). Maybe I’ll try them in the future.
MediaTemple was another contender. They look really cool as well. Why not MediaTemple? Frankly, they seem sketchy. Their gs plan offers 100GB of “premium” storage. WTF is that? RAID‘d? NAS? SCSI? An IDE drive that’s been pimped out with glitter? I have no idea. That’s scary. They also claim that a gs account “Automatically grows to support any load level.” That’s a lie – a blatant lie. Nothing can infinitely scale. If this were true, no one would use other hosting. That does it for me. When a hosting provider is that blatantly overselling, you know you’re buying snakeoil.
What about WebFaction? I really like WebFaction. They’re fair and well priced. If you want shared hosting, I would recommend them over any shared hosting company out there. They’re fast, cheap and reliable. Why didn’t I go with them? Mostly I like having root. WebFaction lets you admin Apache to an extent which is cool and they’re great for Django hosting, but I wanted more. NOTE: I still use WebFaction for a production website that gets upwards of 5–10k hits per day.
As for Django, that will be a later entry.