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OT: does anybody have a positive experience with slicehost's 256 slice?

17 points by ahold 19y ago

If yes, how many pageviews or visits daily you have?

boucher 19y ago
Actually, we've been having some issues with our 256 slice. We're running our svn and trac off it, and trac runs incredibly slow. Our app has poor data transfer rates when we send anything of a significant size over the wire.
hollywoodcole 19y ago
This question pops up a lot on Slicehost's Forum. Search for "views 256" @ http://forum.slicehost.com/search.php http://forum.slicehost.com/search.php. You will see all the many people running from blogs to rails on 256mb without a problem.
speric 19y ago
Yes, my experience so far has been positive. I got Ruby on Rails up and running fairly easily; it's documented here: http://www.perplexedlabs.com/2008/02/04/building-a-rails-capable-slice-from-scratch/ http://www.perplexedlabs.com/2008/02/04/building-a-rails-cap...
- joshwa 19y ago
  Deprec also works nicely for the initial setup
carpal 19y ago
I did pretty well on a 256 meg slice. I outgrew it after awhile, and I'm currently running 8 mongrels on a 512 slice, and I'm pretty much hitting the top. RAM is by far the biggest bottleneck for me. Overall, Slicehost is great. I just wish they'd include more RAM in their plans.
- chorlya 19y ago
  I agree. I'd rather go with Slicehost, but extra RAM that Linode offers is just too precious to ignore.
- kschrader 19y ago
  I end up restarting Typo several times a week because I run into memory issues. Hopefully they'll have a way to add more RAM soon.
- nikolaj 19y ago
  I have several slices.. putting nginx in front of apache and lowering down apache's processes has really helped me tighten up my memory needs (I use django).
evilicious 19y ago
I just posted about doing some basic load testing on my 256 slice here: http://blog.notedpath.com/2008/02/10/using-jmeter-for-load-testing/ http://blog.notedpath.com/2008/02/10/using-jmeter-for-load-t...
rob 19y ago
We have been using Slicehost's 256MB slice for a little over two months now for a PHP site and haven't had any issues; uptime has been excellent and support is great. The fact that they are one of the few providers to offer Arch Linux is another plus, too. Another place I personally purchased a VPS from to test out is Linode (http://linode.com http://linode.com). I've only had it for a week so far, but so far no problems. If you're going to run a Rails app, you might want to look at them as for $20 they provide 360MB of RAM instead of 256 :) Their community seems on par with Slicehost. Their Xen is in beta testing, though, so for now their VPS' run UML.
- marketer 19y ago
  I tried both linode and slicehost, and I far prefer slicehost. Their service is absolutely amazing, but more importantly they have hardware virtualization, instead of linode which only offers UML
  - rob 19y ago
    Linode actually has Xen, but it's been in beta for a while. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't compare, but once you register for it in the CP it will migrate your data/IP to the Xen platform without any changes on your end.
  - cstejerean 19y ago
    I was considering between linode and slicehost. Linode signup process was a big hassle compared to slicehost so I picked slicehost. I've been very satisfied to date (2x 256 and 1x 512 slice)
    - cstejerean 19y ago
      Here is a post I wrote a while ago about the reasons why I picked Slicehost over Linode http://blog.offbytwo.com/2008/01/05/moving-to-slicehost/ http://blog.offbytwo.com/2008/01/05/moving-to-slicehost/
- indrax 19y ago
  I've had a linode for a couple of years. I love it. I'm very low load, so I'm not sure how my account would hold up with any real traffic. One thing I love about linode is that you get upgrades almost seamlessly. I rarely ever need to log into the main page, so when I do I end up find out out that my ram and available storage has increased. Since I started I think my storage has gone from 2g to 10g, and memory from I think 64m to 360m. (you have to grow your partition or create a partition to use the extra space, which is a small amount of downtime. It looks like using the extra memory requires a reboot, as I still only have 251864 kB, which suggests the 360m upgrade was within the last 171 days.) I used a variety of virtual hosts before linode, with mixed results. I haven't regretted going with linode for one moment. Period.
edavis10 19y ago
I've had both Slicehost and Linode, and Slicehost is much faster by far (Xen). I used the 256 slice to power a few of my Rails applications, but I upgraded to the 512 so I can add more. The best experience I had with Slicehost was the upgrade from 256 to 512. It was a couple clicks on their admin panel, 30 minutes of downtime, and then a quick SSH to verify everything was good.
alaskamiller 19y ago
http://searchyc.com http://searchyc.com is hosted on linode for a couple of months now and it's been great. we initially wanted to go with slicehost but last year their wait list was so atrociously long that we gave up on ever seeing their invite. for the same $19.99 linode has more bandwidth and memory and xen support. really, what we've realized is actually most expensive is the cpu cycles since our app would crash consistently because the shared resources peaked when we started stress testing. since then with better resource management, better apache fiddling, and a couple rewrites we're handling a peak loads of more than 2000 people and an average load of 500 people. linode's documentation is somewhat lacking, i much prefer slicehost's wiki and forum for support but other than that we have a cluster of 4 or 5 linodes running and it's been great.
richcollins 19y ago
I host my blog and personal site on it. I haven't had a single issue.
walesmd 19y ago
Slicehost is amazing. I'm currently running 3 Wordpress blogs off of a 256MB slice. I would highly recommend either ditching Apache or going with a larger slice though. I did experience some memory issues when using Apache (although this could be cleared up with a bit more configuration on my end). Regardless, I'm running Lighttpd (10 work handlers using the same amount of RAM as 1 Apache handler), proftpd, MySQL 5, PHP5 via FastCGI, and sendmail. I've never dipped below 80MB RAM left and load times are extremely quick. I've offloaded my email services to Google Apps, which has it's advantageous and disadvantageous.
- apgwoz 19y ago
  Is sendmail setup to route mail through Google then? I've been trying to figure out the best way to approach email. Right now, I'm using google apps and a Django patch for TLS support. It's not ideal and I'd like to change the setup.
  - lyime 18y ago
    You can have Google Apps and Postfix installed on your slice. Articles.slicehost.com Guide 1 and 2 walk you through setting those things up. Its trivial and powerful.
conorh 19y ago
I have a 256 meg slice which has been rock solid and with no issues. I use Litespeed (http://www.litespeedtech.com/ http://www.litespeedtech.com/) for the web server. It is excellent for Ruby on Rails hosting. It dynamically manages Ruby processes - if there is no traffic it shuts down the processes, if there is traffic it ramps up the number as necessary up to the max that you specify. On my slice I have a few PHP sites, a few static sites and 4 RoR sites (most of which get very little traffic.) Overall about 30k page views a day. Litespeed isn't open source, but it is free and it works great for my hosting.
- rms 19y ago
  What control panel are you using with it? I would switch to Litespeed if i could keep using Virtualmin...
  - stillmotion 19y ago
    When you get to a stage of using a VPS or your own dedicated machine it's highly recommended that you begin to learn how to use your server without a control panel. You'll be glad you did.
bosky101 19y ago
on slicehost 256mb ram, running erlang + yaws . nice documentation, setup. but off late have have to do couple of server restarts , coz of what seems like to be unscheduled reboots . need to investigate. so helps a lot to have a service like monitorus etc that pings u via mail when the server down,etc.
Todd 19y ago
I have nothing but good things to say about Slicehost. That said, 256 is a very small sandbox and Apache doesn't play nicely in small sandboxes without tweaking. Our site runs several PHP apps. We hit the wall one day with a number of apache2 processes hitting the 60-80MB range. I could barely SSH in to fix things. We ended up arriving empirically at the following (taken from /etc/apache2/apache2.conf), without stress testing, but watching patterns over several weeks. <IfModule mpm_prefork_module> StartServers 2 MinSpareServers 3 MaxSpareServers 6 # MaxClients 150 MaxClients 10 # MaxRequestsPerChild 0 MaxRequestsPerChild 200 </IfModule> The key is to take MaxClients down to a small number, like 8-10, as each of these normally takes anywhere from 2-40MB. To make this work, you'll need to have the request count set reasonably small. We set ours to 200, so RAM consumption doesn't get too large before the process is cycled. People often suggest 4000 or some such number but the process just grew too large with that setting. You'll also note that we have tuned the startup and idle parameters to be very conservative. This is probably a laughable configuration for many sites, but it works well for a light site like ours running a few PHP apps. I should note that we're also running MySQL and PostgreSQL. They don't have a big impact on RAM under light load.
luccastera 19y ago
I've been using SliceHost for almost a year now and I'm very happy with their service.

17 points by ahold 19y ago

If yes, how many pageviews or visits daily you have?

Actually, we've been having some issues with our 256 slice. We're running our svn and trac off it, and trac runs incredibly slow. Our app has poor data transfer rates when we send anything of a significant size over the wire.

hollywoodcole 19y ago

This question pops up a lot on Slicehost's Forum. Search for "views 256" @ http://forum.slicehost.com/search.php http://forum.slicehost.com/search.php. You will see all the many people running from blogs to rails on 256mb without a problem.

speric 19y ago

Yes, my experience so far has been positive. I got Ruby on Rails up and running fairly easily; it's documented here: http://www.perplexedlabs.com/2008/02/04/building-a-rails-capable-slice-from-scratch/ http://www.perplexedlabs.com/2008/02/04/building-a-rails-cap...

joshwa 19y ago
Deprec also works nicely for the initial setup

carpal 19y ago

I did pretty well on a 256 meg slice. I outgrew it after awhile, and I'm currently running 8 mongrels on a 512 slice, and I'm pretty much hitting the top. RAM is by far the biggest bottleneck for me. Overall, Slicehost is great. I just wish they'd include more RAM in their plans.

chorlya 19y ago
I agree. I'd rather go with Slicehost, but extra RAM that Linode offers is just too precious to ignore.
kschrader 19y ago
I end up restarting Typo several times a week because I run into memory issues. Hopefully they'll have a way to add more RAM soon.
nikolaj 19y ago
I have several slices.. putting nginx in front of apache and lowering down apache's processes has really helped me tighten up my memory needs (I use django).

evilicious 19y ago

I just posted about doing some basic load testing on my 256 slice here: http://blog.notedpath.com/2008/02/10/using-jmeter-for-load-testing/ http://blog.notedpath.com/2008/02/10/using-jmeter-for-load-t...

rob 19y ago

We have been using Slicehost's 256MB slice for a little over two months now for a PHP site and haven't had any issues; uptime has been excellent and support is great. The fact that they are one of the few providers to offer Arch Linux is another plus, too. Another place I personally purchased a VPS from to test out is Linode (http://linode.com http://linode.com). I've only had it for a week so far, but so far no problems. If you're going to run a Rails app, you might want to look at them as for $20 they provide 360MB of RAM instead of 256 :) Their community seems on par with Slicehost. Their Xen is in beta testing, though, so for now their VPS' run UML.

marketer 19y ago
I tried both linode and slicehost, and I far prefer slicehost. Their service is absolutely amazing, but more importantly they have hardware virtualization, instead of linode which only offers UML
- rob 19y ago
  Linode actually has Xen, but it's been in beta for a while. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't compare, but once you register for it in the CP it will migrate your data/IP to the Xen platform without any changes on your end.
- cstejerean 19y ago
  I was considering between linode and slicehost. Linode signup process was a big hassle compared to slicehost so I picked slicehost. I've been very satisfied to date (2x 256 and 1x 512 slice)
  - cstejerean 19y ago
    Here is a post I wrote a while ago about the reasons why I picked Slicehost over Linode http://blog.offbytwo.com/2008/01/05/moving-to-slicehost/ http://blog.offbytwo.com/2008/01/05/moving-to-slicehost/
indrax 19y ago
I've had a linode for a couple of years. I love it. I'm very low load, so I'm not sure how my account would hold up with any real traffic. One thing I love about linode is that you get upgrades almost seamlessly. I rarely ever need to log into the main page, so when I do I end up find out out that my ram and available storage has increased. Since I started I think my storage has gone from 2g to 10g, and memory from I think 64m to 360m. (you have to grow your partition or create a partition to use the extra space, which is a small amount of downtime. It looks like using the extra memory requires a reboot, as I still only have 251864 kB, which suggests the 360m upgrade was within the last 171 days.) I used a variety of virtual hosts before linode, with mixed results. I haven't regretted going with linode for one moment. Period.

edavis10 19y ago

I've had both Slicehost and Linode, and Slicehost is much faster by far (Xen). I used the 256 slice to power a few of my Rails applications, but I upgraded to the 512 so I can add more. The best experience I had with Slicehost was the upgrade from 256 to 512. It was a couple clicks on their admin panel, 30 minutes of downtime, and then a quick SSH to verify everything was good.

alaskamiller 19y ago

http://searchyc.com http://searchyc.com is hosted on linode for a couple of months now and it's been great. we initially wanted to go with slicehost but last year their wait list was so atrociously long that we gave up on ever seeing their invite. for the same $19.99 linode has more bandwidth and memory and xen support. really, what we've realized is actually most expensive is the cpu cycles since our app would crash consistently because the shared resources peaked when we started stress testing. since then with better resource management, better apache fiddling, and a couple rewrites we're handling a peak loads of more than 2000 people and an average load of 500 people. linode's documentation is somewhat lacking, i much prefer slicehost's wiki and forum for support but other than that we have a cluster of 4 or 5 linodes running and it's been great.

richcollins 19y ago

I host my blog and personal site on it. I haven't had a single issue.

walesmd 19y ago

Slicehost is amazing. I'm currently running 3 Wordpress blogs off of a 256MB slice. I would highly recommend either ditching Apache or going with a larger slice though. I did experience some memory issues when using Apache (although this could be cleared up with a bit more configuration on my end). Regardless, I'm running Lighttpd (10 work handlers using the same amount of RAM as 1 Apache handler), proftpd, MySQL 5, PHP5 via FastCGI, and sendmail. I've never dipped below 80MB RAM left and load times are extremely quick. I've offloaded my email services to Google Apps, which has it's advantageous and disadvantageous.

apgwoz 19y ago
Is sendmail setup to route mail through Google then? I've been trying to figure out the best way to approach email. Right now, I'm using google apps and a Django patch for TLS support. It's not ideal and I'd like to change the setup.
- lyime 18y ago
  You can have Google Apps and Postfix installed on your slice. Articles.slicehost.com Guide 1 and 2 walk you through setting those things up. Its trivial and powerful.

conorh 19y ago

I have a 256 meg slice which has been rock solid and with no issues. I use Litespeed (http://www.litespeedtech.com/ http://www.litespeedtech.com/) for the web server. It is excellent for Ruby on Rails hosting. It dynamically manages Ruby processes - if there is no traffic it shuts down the processes, if there is traffic it ramps up the number as necessary up to the max that you specify. On my slice I have a few PHP sites, a few static sites and 4 RoR sites (most of which get very little traffic.) Overall about 30k page views a day. Litespeed isn't open source, but it is free and it works great for my hosting.

rms 19y ago
What control panel are you using with it? I would switch to Litespeed if i could keep using Virtualmin...
- stillmotion 19y ago
  When you get to a stage of using a VPS or your own dedicated machine it's highly recommended that you begin to learn how to use your server without a control panel. You'll be glad you did.

bosky101 19y ago

on slicehost 256mb ram, running erlang + yaws . nice documentation, setup. but off late have have to do couple of server restarts , coz of what seems like to be unscheduled reboots . need to investigate. so helps a lot to have a service like monitorus etc that pings u via mail when the server down,etc.

Todd 19y ago

I have nothing but good things to say about Slicehost. That said, 256 is a very small sandbox and Apache doesn't play nicely in small sandboxes without tweaking. Our site runs several PHP apps. We hit the wall one day with a number of apache2 processes hitting the 60-80MB range. I could barely SSH in to fix things. We ended up arriving empirically at the following (taken from /etc/apache2/apache2.conf), without stress testing, but watching patterns over several weeks. <IfModule mpm_prefork_module> StartServers 2 MinSpareServers 3 MaxSpareServers 6 # MaxClients 150 MaxClients 10 # MaxRequestsPerChild 0 MaxRequestsPerChild 200 </IfModule> The key is to take MaxClients down to a small number, like 8-10, as each of these normally takes anywhere from 2-40MB. To make this work, you'll need to have the request count set reasonably small. We set ours to 200, so RAM consumption doesn't get too large before the process is cycled. People often suggest 4000 or some such number but the process just grew too large with that setting. You'll also note that we have tuned the startup and idle parameters to be very conservative. This is probably a laughable configuration for many sites, but it works well for a light site like ours running a few PHP apps. I should note that we're also running MySQL and PostgreSQL. They don't have a big impact on RAM under light load.

luccastera 19y ago

I've been using SliceHost for almost a year now and I'm very happy with their service.