Slicehost

You may have noticed Where’s Lou has changed it’s theme recently and has also gone on a sidebar diet. That’s combined with an update to the current version of Wordpress so the backside is nicer in general and has fixed some editor quirks I’ve been coping with.

But even though there were those improvements I started to experience unexplainable outages where any php file on the entire account would simply not respond. I have more than Where’s Lou running on GoDaddy so it was easy to show it wasn’t a blog specific problem.

So enough was enough! Following a lead from Jamie I took a look at Slicehost. It turned out to be as quick, easy, and cool as he’d implied. There’s a huge clarity of thought in the service they provide, how they sell it to you, and how they explain the way to use it.

And after a fairly quick zip and copy of the entire wp folder, and a slightly less quick export and mysql <blah.sql load of the associated database, and an hour or two of mucking around with virtual host files in apache, Where’s Lou was up and running and the dns entry was switched over.

Which is you you got here. Unless you’re reading this on an Rss readed. In which case, nevermind. :)

In the end my opinion of Slicehost is very, very positive. But it might not be for everyone. I’ve had a bunch of simple-to-moderate experiences with Ubuntu and other distros for a variety of reasons in the last year (Rails, Asterisk, etc.) so jumping into a newly-installed Linux was no problem. Kind of fun really.

How does it compare to GoDaddy in particular? It’s probably too soon to say how it compares for stability and speed but it looks good so far and the resource sharing technology promises to provide a guaranteed level of horsepower for both web and database. GoDaddy was easier to use initially, but the use of ftp for file management and lack of built-in shell access were a pain. In the end though it was the most recent service outage and ridiculous technical support are what made the difference.