Yesterday I moved this domain over to Slicehost.
Ian first told me about Slicehost when we were both looking to move away from Dreamhost last November. Initially, we both intended to find another shared host, but that proved far too difficult — it seems most hosting companies have something against shared hosting with decent limits and ssh access (that last part is the kicker).
I signed up with Slicehost at the end of last year and tinkered around with it for a month or so, experimenting with setting up the server in different ways. Eventually, I found an Ubuntu-Nginx-PHP-MySQL-Postfix-Dovecot setup that I enjoyed, and one which I was comfortable administering. In the beginning of the year, I moved a couple of my domains over to the Slice. It’s been a great experience. I’m not sure why it took me 6 months to finally move this domain — my primary one — over. Running a VPS is deceivingly simple* and well worth the effort. If you’re currently running on a shared host and have some basic competency in a UNIX environment, I’d recommend giving it a shot.
In a bit I’ll post a series of guides, compiled from my notes, on how I setup the server.
* It’s deceivingly simple if you’re not running a full mail server with virtual users running around everywhere. That part was a pain. Hence, the move to Google.
Hey Peter,
I wondered why you switched from dreamhost, your recommendation of their services a few years back is what convinced me to sign up…
Thanks,
Mark
Dreamhost has gone downhill in the past couple years. They oversell, which leads to the instability of their services, slow response times, and unacceptable amounts of downtime. The breach last year demonstrated that they don’t put a whole lot of thought into security. The billing error earlier this year was unacceptable.
They were a great hosting company when they were small, but now they’re just cheap storage space.
Hi. Came across this post (actually first the one saying you were moving away from slicehost) and thought I’d ping you, though I can’t beat most webhosting providers’ costs, I can do much more flexible configurations (though I wouldn’t call allowing ssh all that fancy…)
Anyway, I’ve been playing around some with slicehost, and think they are interesting, and certainly nice for the speed of setting up a new server (as opposed to purchasing my own servers, which I usually do).
Anyway, I run a webhosting company, and don’t have any unsatisfied customers… The geeky folks like me since I’m just like them, and can install custom packages for them, and the secretaries like me since I do more work for them than a regular web host.
Anyway, advertisement over – I was happy to see that you weren’t leaving slicehost for performance reasons or anything like that. They have been pretty good for me (using them for 8 months so far).