8 ms·

Slicehost accounts will be converted to Rackspace cloud accounts

198 points by jsprinkles 15y ago

mindcrime 15y ago
Interesting stuff... I'd been thinking about leaving Slicehost for Linode anyway; now I guess I should at least wait and see what the new setup is going to look like. Any current Rackspace Cloud customers want to comment on their experience(s)?
- plusbryan 15y ago
  Rackspace Sites user here - same control panel, different product (was called Mosso). CP is pretty terrible, but services are fast/reliable.
- epochwolf 15y ago
  The control panel sucks, see my comment above
epochwolf 15y ago
Great. I hope rackspace fixes their control panel before this happens. The current one has required me to contact support to make dns changes because my end was throwing errors. After a year of that bullshit I left for a different host. I found rackspace's servers to be excellent but the control panel is very slow, buggy, and lacks functionality that the slicehost panel has. (like setting TXT records in the dns.) Edit: Just to note. The only issue I've had with rackspace was the control panel. The support was excellent. The people working there are excellent. I want to use their product. The control panel not working just made me feel dependent on support for everything I'd rather manage myself.
- forsaken 15y ago
  Yes! I can't believe the control panel has been able to exist in such a shitty state for a long time. I mostly interact with cloudservers through the API these days, but last I remember, the control panel didn't let you set up wildcard DNS, which was a major use-case for me. It actually had javascript validation to disallow it, if you turned off JS, it worked fine.
nbpoole 15y ago
Or you can switch to Linode, which provides more resources and a more fully-featured web interface for less money. I switched several months back and I haven't run into a single issue. :) Edit: To be fair to Slicehost, they provided me with wonderful service for over a year and I never had a single issue while I was with them. I'm sad to see that they'll be shutting down.
- icey 15y ago
  I don't know how feasible this is; but it would be killer to be able to have a 1-click migration process. i.e. "Moving from slicehost? Provide your credentials and we'll bring everything over automatically. Just click this button!"
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    It's relatively feasible, as the current migration process basically consists of killing all services on your slicehost server, rsyncing everything to linode and running a sed script to change the IPs. I have no idea why they don't do it, they'd have a billion more customers in a few days. I know I wanted to switch off Slicehost for years, their price is DOUBLE linode's and the performance is worse.
    - jonknee 15y ago
      ... Just wait until the Rackspace Cloud transfer--the prices are quadruple Linode's if you use your bandwidth.
      - StavrosK 15y ago
        Oh, I moved off months ago. It was easy, in the end.
  - ben1040 15y ago
    A couple months ago someone posted a link on HN to a pretty cool looking tool that automatically would generate a Puppet script based on your server environment (packages installed, etc). I didn't save it, and I can't find it now from googling. Now I've set up a Linode account and want to migrate my config from Slicehost, and it looks like this might be a useful opportunity to test out that tool. But for the life of me I can't remember it's name. Does anyone have a link?
plusbryan 15y ago
Misleading title: Slicehost accounts will be converted to Rackspace cloud accounts. They are killing the brand, not the product.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - jsprinkles 15y ago
    I read the entire e-mail before posting it and my title is accurate. The brand is being killed as is the product because these are two different products with two different backends which the e-mail hints at. You are free to disagree with my title but don't accuse me of things I do not do.
  - tdupree 15y ago
    There were three posts with the same news in the "new" section with appropriate headlines all before this post. I think it is more a failing on those up-voting the most catchy headline.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- locopati 15y ago
  Afaik, Rackspace cloud accounts are more expensive than Slicehost accounts. Have you seen or do you know of how this changes pricing?
  - hellweaver666 15y ago
    I'm not especially bothered personally as I had already decided to make the jump to Linode in coming months... this has just hastend my resolve.
  - mdp 15y ago
    Actually, I made the switch from Slicehost to Rackspace because it was cheaper. It's pay for what you eat pricing, so you don't get a free allotment of bandwidth, but it's around ~$11 for a 256 meg instance. My biggest concern is that the Rackspace Cloud product doesn't seem as polished as Slicehost. Slicehost was a great service for newer users, with great documentation and help resources.
MichaelGG 15y ago
They advertise starting at 1.5cents/hr. Does that mean the cheapest "cloud server" I can get is $108? Versus the $20 or so I'm paying now? Edit: 1.5 cents is actually $10.8 a month. Nevermind :\.
- trotsky 15y ago
  $10.80 (just correcting the math, I don't actually know about their fees)
  - MichaelGG 15y ago
    Oh duh, I put 15 cents in. How do I downvote myself?
rkischuk 15y ago
My first instinct is to plan a migration to Linode or Softlayer. I use SliceHost because I want to push a button and have a running server, and push another button to resize it in less than a minute. If I wanted more control, I'd be using EC2. I'm hoping someone with Rackspace Cloud experience can pipe in, but at a glance, it looks like a more bare-metal offering, like EC2, where you have to worry about more of the low-level concerns. Thoughts?
- rkischuk 15y ago
  I'm hearing from Rackspace that the merged offering will preserve the easy provision/upgrade features. No promises on the pricing, however.
- sbarre 15y ago
  I've been using Rackspace Cloud Servers for about a year now, and like everyone else is saying the control panel is a bit weak, but you do get "push a button, get a server" tools on there. I'm far from a super sysadmin but I've been able to create/remove servers, resize them and generally administer them competently without any trouble using the Rackspace control panel. That said, my needs are fairly simple. The most complex thing I've had to do is provision additional IPv4 addresses on one of the servers (for SSL hosting), and a support person did that for me in under 10 minutes via their web-based chat support. Unless you have a site that will actually use the gobs of bandwidth that Slicehost or Linode includes (and I don't), then Rackspace Cloud will end up being cheaper.. My single-IP servers cost me between $11 and $15 per month on average, based on bandwidth used.
- wallfly 15y ago
  No, you are incorrect. Slicehost technology is Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. Cloud servers and Slicehost slices are running in the same racks on the same hardware using identical technology stacks -- always have been. The control panel for managing a Rackspace Cloud account and products (including servers) is distinct from the Slicehost customer control panel, and the support teams were distinct groups of people. Now these two corporate structures and logical pools of resources will simply be merged under the name Rackspace Cloud Servers.
baggachipz 15y ago
I've been waiting for the final reason to force me to transition my sites off my Slicehost account. They've clearly been gutted and left in the dust; their plans haven't upgraded in specs while their competitors have. It's really too bad, Slicehost was so great before they were purchased.
- patrickod 15y ago
  They had the best customer service of anybody I've ever used. I'm sad to see them go
  - blhack 15y ago
    Absolutely. Slicehost has been the example I've used for "doing it right" for quite some time. The chat was awesome. You could jump in there at pretty much any time and start talking to somebody who could help you immediately.
    - robszumski 15y ago
      Rackspace has live chat too...
  - epochwolf 15y ago
    Rackspace has excellent 1 on 1 support with livechat.
starnix17 15y ago
I hope they keep their articles section, it was really helpful for me when I was setting up my first VPS.
- colbyolson 15y ago
  I totally agree. Those articles saved me a lot of time and were very helpful.
- trustfundbaby 15y ago
  Yup ... I was a linode customer but I set up my instance using the slicehost tutorials :\
- subbu 15y ago
  I don't use Slicehost anymore but I use their articles to setup any Linux machines. I am so dependent on these articles that I have saved an offline copy of these articles using HTTrack.
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  I have used also used their docs as well, while never having actually been a customer. Some of the best generalised VPS admin resources for newcomers out there, it'd be tragic if it went.
jcampbell1 15y ago
Is it just me, or is this an example of terrible corporate communication. As a slicehost customer, I don't give a shit about what Mark thinks about IPv6 and OpenStack. All I care about is what is going to change. He makes statements like "as seamless as possible". That doesn't have any meaning. If the major change is going to be a new control panel, and a different way of accessing support, then just say so.
- plusbryan 15y ago
  For what it's worth, the Mosso -> Cloud Sites transition was pretty seamless.
- legooolas 15y ago
  It's not just you. An email that starts with "I would like to start a dialogue about our plans for..." makes me think "uh-oh" immediately. Slicehost has only changed for the worse since their merge, from my experience with them :/ I recommended them to several friends and colleagues, but from what I've seen of Rackspaces offering I wouldn't be able to do that with them. RIP Slicehost :(
  - brettnak 15y ago
    I totally agree. The control panel on Rack Space has kept me from ever recommending them. I love the Slicehost management panel. I also love the Linode panel. I do not love the Rack Space cp.
- dablue 15y ago
  Agree, it was a badly composed email... before reading the comments here, I comprehended the email as Slicehost was shutting down and my slice would be killed also. Quit the corporate talk and just say "Hey! We've decided to pull the plug from SliceHost but rest assured, we will safely migrate your slices to RackSpace." Put that in the first line of the email then followup with whatever else you want to say about the migration!
- igrekel 15y ago
  I agree that the email is just about things that have little interest to customers. My own questions were more along the lines of: - Will I need to restart my servers, reinstall, reconfigure them for the change? - How long will be the downtime? - Will the IP change (My DNS is managed elsewhere) - Will it still be 64 bit? - When will this happen approximately? - Will we able to choose when it happens for our instances? Also the fact that I haven't received the email myself is not reassuring at all. I am not going to just sit around and remain without a predictable migration path, be it a migration to Rackspace or elsewhere.
jen_h 15y ago
A real bummer. Have really enjoyed the uptime, stability, and performance Slicehost has given us over the last few years. I've got our web site configured to be brought up on AWS in a flash if needed--but we've never needed...uptime of 99.99% in the last year, 100% in the last 6 months. And crazy affordable. Their support/incidence response rocks, too. Vaya con Dios, Slicehost, I loved you much.
ericmoritz 15y ago
I've been putting off moving my Slicehost VPS to Rackspace Cloud. I'm glad I won't have to now.
- amac 15y ago
  Same. I guess it's a re-branding exercise and they'll do most of the heavy lifting for us.
jrockway 15y ago
This is my wakeup call to finally switch over to Linode.
polvi 15y ago
I'm one of the co-founders of Cloudkick (YC W09) and now part of the Rackspace. I wanted to reassure everyone that this is a migration, not "killing" off your slices. The Rackspace Cloud is based on the Slicehost technology, but has the full support and momentum of Rackspace behind it. If you have any questions, concerns, or would like to discuss this with anyone at Rackspace - please do not hesitate to reach out directly to me: alex.polvi@rackspace.com
- yesimahuman 15y ago
  I was a slicehost customer, then a rackspace customer, and now a linode customer. The biggest reason I love linode now is the control panel. Slicehost also had a good control panel, but the Rackspace Cloud CP is severely lacking. It's extremely slow and the DNS is in a really awkward spot (click a server and then click DNS to see a global DNS...it doesn't make sense). I was a fairly happy Rackspace Cloud customer but Linode is just a great experience. What is Rackspace doing to improve the cloud offering?
  - polvi 15y ago
    Rackspace is investing heavily into the cloud. The Cloudkick acquisition was part of that. I am extremely happy to hear that the CP was one of your major pain points, because it is one of (if not the top) priority to improve. The team that is based in San Francisco is working directly on that project. If these sorts of problems are interesting to you, please let me know!
    - yesimahuman 15y ago
      That's great to hear. I'm excited for more competition in the space. That being said, I've raised the issue of the location of the DNS manager many times and have been told that it is by design and won't change. Go to the Linode or Slicehost CP and a link to the DNS manager is on the dashboard, where it should be. I just don't understand the reasoning for hiding it behind a specific server instance despite it being a globally applicable system. This is probably more annoying to me because of the slow speed of the control panel, meaning it takes a long time to get to the DNS manager. Best of luck with the improvements!
trey 15y ago
Just signed up for a year of linode... goodbye slicehost, you were great!
niels_olson 15y ago
For light use, I'm definitely glad I switched from slicehost to prgmr.com.
postfuturist 15y ago
I here a lot of talk about linode, but they are hardly the only competitor. I'm a very happy customer of ARP Networks http://www.arpnetworks.com/vps http://www.arpnetworks.com/vps . They support FreeBSD and OpenBSD in addition to Linux and have competitive pricing. I run 4 low traffic sites (2 rails, 1 sinatra, 1 django) on a $10 VPS without issue (using nginx, thin and tornado).
- wewyor 15y ago
  They are probably the best option if you are going to run openbsd or freebsd on a vps, though if you are going for linux I would say my experience with prgmr (for a similar price range) was much better than arpnetworks and if you want support/dns you should go with linode.
- brndnhy 15y ago
  These guys looks great. Thanks for the BSD tip. DNS and I'd migrate from Linode.
dualboot 15y ago
I'm most curious if this is a marketing decision or a result of an unsustainable business model.
trustfundbaby 15y ago
I remember agonizing over picking slicehost or linode 2/3 years ago ... So glad I went with linode.
- heyimfromreddit 15y ago
  What made you choose Linode?
  - trustfundbaby 15y ago
    In the end it came down to price and size offering. Linode had a 128 or 192MB instance at the time that was insanely priced. Slicehost started at 256MB. There wasn't a lot to separate them otherwise.
seats 15y ago
Definitely a misleading title and kind of unfair to Rackspace. I founded Slicehost (with Matt Tanase) and I absolutely think this is the right thing to do and definitely is the best thing for existing Slicehost customers. Given that this is a public plan now I feel like I can share that during the acquisition process of Slicehost we debated heavily what the right thing was to do with the brand. It was honestly a very very tough call and at the time the thing we all (Matt, me and Rackspace) were most sensitive to was to not disrupt the Slicehost community. We succeeded in that goal but the net effect (unintentionally so) was to disconnect Slicehost from Rackspace's cloud roadmap and effectively strand the product. Unfortunately I think in hindsight I can say that our decision was probably the wrong call. I honestly think everyone would have been better off if we just ripped the band-aid early and tried to figure out how to make the core Cloud Server community out of the incoming Slicehost customers. Control panels, features, pricing, etc all change and in the long run are only ephemerally important. What matters is having your interests be in the direct path for the company that is serving you and as a Rackspace Cloud customer you'll have that, while as a Slicehost customer you did not (post acquisition). I definitely can see this from all sides and for Slicehost customers, all I can say is that at no point along the way did anyone (at Slicehost or Rackspace) ever have less than the best intentions for the brand and the community. There are some serious champions of Slicehost at Rackspace both in the form of former Slicehost employees still there (Paul Tomes, article site creator) and long time Rackers. Trust me that these guys are really working for the best for you all.
- thesethings 15y ago
  Thank you for making an awesome product in Slicehost. You mention that "...control panels...are only ephemerally important..." Many in this thread disagree. You can see it getting brought up over and over as a reason we loved Slicehost, and a reason we don't like other alternatives as much. I won't get too deep into UX theory here, so I'll just say this: people who make apps: if you hear the same comments over and over from your customers, they might be on to something interesting. I truly believe in the expression "listen to what your users do, not what they say." So i'm not gonna pretend every lil gripe we have about this is right. But there is definitely a pattern in this thread that Rackspace can learn from. [update: so far i've counted 18 mentions of the phrase "control panel" in this thread. it, and all user experience, matters a lot.]
wildmXranat 15y ago
What do I do as an administrator with regards to communication and guarantees of up-time when I communicate these concerns to my clients ? Here is my take: The longer Rackspace waits on transition details, the more customers will leave. I will if I don't see a concrete plan of migration, and I realize that these things are not easy.
ANH 15y ago
Rackspace needs to talk about pricing before they lose more customers. I'm a Slicehost customer and my main concern is what the price difference will be. About to set up a Linode account...
- tmarkiewicz 15y ago
  Two weeks ago we started migrating servers to Rackspace Cloud from Slicehost and it appears to be equivalent in pricing to slightly less expensive for us. YMMV depending on bandwidth, storage needs, RAM.
mrtron 15y ago
Let me explain why this is incredibly annoying for a long term (read: selfish) customer. I have a ton of apps running on my old slices. A client pays monthly for the one slice and it really doesn't look like it will cover costs with the shift to their 'cloud' servers. I really don't want to have to go and reconfigure several versions of python and django and several apps. I don't want to migrate databases. I don't want to move various processes that have been running without being touched for 3-5 years. The email doesn't give us any indication of the migration path. I don't care about your IPv6 problems or your OpenStack announcements. Even something like domains hasn't been addressed. I use the slicehost interface to manage a dozen or so domains and their subdomains. Am I going to have to shift nameservers and reconfigure these domains? Read their initial announcement to gain some perspective on how the acquisition was described. "Our number one goal is to continue delivering the Slicehost experience. In fact, we hope to make it even better." http://www.slicehost.com/rackspace http://www.slicehost.com/rackspace
- StavrosK 15y ago
  As far as I remember, Linode have a tool to migrate your DNS automatically. Migration, for me, was relatively painless, apart from the fact that I had to confirm each domain and change the IPs by hand. I'm sure you can write a script to do it, if you have many. If you're worried about costs, Linode's price is half Slicehost's. That should make the migration time worth it.
  - macmac 15y ago
    Is https://github.com/Schultz/slicedns2linode https://github.com/Schultz/slicedns2linode what you mean?
    - StavrosK 15y ago
      Unfortunately I'm not exactly sure what I used... This looks like it, though.
    - logic 15y ago
      Thank you for posting this. Aside from one wildcard record (that shouldn't have worked anyway), it handled all of my zones perfectly.
brlewis 15y ago
I hope the flood of refugees doesn't make my Linode 1024 slower.
mhidalgo 15y ago
The server administration information on slicehost has been real useful for me, I hope they port that documentation over and it doesn't get lost. The articles were basically my introduction to setting up a web server, db , and installing language packages.
burke 15y ago
I'm seriously considering migrating from Slicehost to Linode. I've been a Slicehost customer for over 2 years. I was happy with them at first, but I don't think I've noticed a single thing change about their service since I signed up. Particularly the pricing. I'm now paying double what I would at Linode for a 1024MB VPS, and the control panel isn't as nice. These guys dropped the ball, big time. This announcement (Very vague -- I don't even understand what they're announcing) will probably just make me start migrating this weekend.
tomkarlo 15y ago
Slicehost was awesome but my more recent sites have been on AWS. If they're going to force me to transition my whole setup, I'm going to move it over there and make my life easier. Not very happy with this whole thing.
Interrante 15y ago
I'm Mark Interrante, from Rackspace, I wanted to let you know that we will have an FAQ on the transition posted at the Slicehost forums and on Hacker News in the next 24 hours.
- Poiesis 15y ago
  As of now, you have not appeared to live up to your promise. I don't see anything here, in the first few pages of new submissions, or on the forums first page. You do not make a compelling case for continuing with you through the transition.
patio11 15y ago
I have paid Slicehost a premium for a few years to avoid having to spend expensive engineer time on a migration to an unproven system which will almost certainly require downtime and break something in production. This announcement is absence-of-happy for me. I respect the desire to EOL an old product line holding up dev schedules, but this email has a lot of things which scare me (multi month dialogue about migration? Translation: "hit a button to reboot server" is not in the cards.) It also doesn't identify any benefit for me to stay: Rackspace's dev problems are not my problems because, prior to this email, my servers worked.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
antihero 15y ago
Didn't Rackspace just give up indymedia's servers with zero fight?
- nenolod 15y ago
  well, that's the danger of MLAT treaties in this time of multinational corporations. even though ahimsa.i.o was hosted in london, the datacenter facility was owned by rackspace which was based in the USA so they had to comply with the MLAT request initiated by the dutch. it was a shitty deal, but certainly not rackspace's fault completely.
chopsueyar 15y ago
You won't notice a thing. -Rackspace
evertonfuller 15y ago
Goodbye Slicehost. Hello Linode.
pilib 15y ago
About a year ago, when I was making plans to rent a vps for my personal sites and projects, Slicehost and Linode were the only real contenders. Slicehost had backups at the time, Linode didn't, but Linode had a slightly better offer overall. In addition to that, a review from uggedal.com favored Linode. Later, they doubled the memory, introduced backups, so in my mind, I made the right choice. I must say, Slicehost articles are great though. They are exceptionally well written. Not that Linode's articles are bad, but Slicehost articles are really good guides.
rhaygood 15y ago
I'm a Slicehost customer, and I just found out about all this from a blog - it's two days after this Hacker News post, and I still haven't received email about the matter. Rackspace, I'm very, very unimpressed.

198 points by jsprinkles 15y ago

Interesting stuff... I'd been thinking about leaving Slicehost for Linode anyway; now I guess I should at least wait and see what the new setup is going to look like. Any current Rackspace Cloud customers want to comment on their experience(s)?

plusbryan 15y ago
Rackspace Sites user here - same control panel, different product (was called Mosso). CP is pretty terrible, but services are fast/reliable.
epochwolf 15y ago
The control panel sucks, see my comment above

epochwolf 15y ago

Great. I hope rackspace fixes their control panel before this happens. The current one has required me to contact support to make dns changes because my end was throwing errors. After a year of that bullshit I left for a different host. I found rackspace's servers to be excellent but the control panel is very slow, buggy, and lacks functionality that the slicehost panel has. (like setting TXT records in the dns.) Edit: Just to note. The only issue I've had with rackspace was the control panel. The support was excellent. The people working there are excellent. I want to use their product. The control panel not working just made me feel dependent on support for everything I'd rather manage myself.

forsaken 15y ago
Yes! I can't believe the control panel has been able to exist in such a shitty state for a long time. I mostly interact with cloudservers through the API these days, but last I remember, the control panel didn't let you set up wildcard DNS, which was a major use-case for me. It actually had javascript validation to disallow it, if you turned off JS, it worked fine.

nbpoole 15y ago

Or you can switch to Linode, which provides more resources and a more fully-featured web interface for less money. I switched several months back and I haven't run into a single issue. :) Edit: To be fair to Slicehost, they provided me with wonderful service for over a year and I never had a single issue while I was with them. I'm sad to see that they'll be shutting down.

icey 15y ago
I don't know how feasible this is; but it would be killer to be able to have a 1-click migration process. i.e. "Moving from slicehost? Provide your credentials and we'll bring everything over automatically. Just click this button!"
- StavrosK 15y ago
  It's relatively feasible, as the current migration process basically consists of killing all services on your slicehost server, rsyncing everything to linode and running a sed script to change the IPs. I have no idea why they don't do it, they'd have a billion more customers in a few days. I know I wanted to switch off Slicehost for years, their price is DOUBLE linode's and the performance is worse.
  - jonknee 15y ago
    ... Just wait until the Rackspace Cloud transfer--the prices are quadruple Linode's if you use your bandwidth.
    - StavrosK 15y ago
      Oh, I moved off months ago. It was easy, in the end.
- ben1040 15y ago
  A couple months ago someone posted a link on HN to a pretty cool looking tool that automatically would generate a Puppet script based on your server environment (packages installed, etc). I didn't save it, and I can't find it now from googling. Now I've set up a Linode account and want to migrate my config from Slicehost, and it looks like this might be a useful opportunity to test out that tool. But for the life of me I can't remember it's name. Does anyone have a link?

plusbryan 15y ago

Misleading title: Slicehost accounts will be converted to Rackspace cloud accounts. They are killing the brand, not the product.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- jsprinkles 15y ago
  I read the entire e-mail before posting it and my title is accurate. The brand is being killed as is the product because these are two different products with two different backends which the e-mail hints at. You are free to disagree with my title but don't accuse me of things I do not do.
- tdupree 15y ago
  There were three posts with the same news in the "new" section with appropriate headlines all before this post. I think it is more a failing on those up-voting the most catchy headline.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
locopati 15y ago
Afaik, Rackspace cloud accounts are more expensive than Slicehost accounts. Have you seen or do you know of how this changes pricing?
- hellweaver666 15y ago
  I'm not especially bothered personally as I had already decided to make the jump to Linode in coming months... this has just hastend my resolve.
- mdp 15y ago
  Actually, I made the switch from Slicehost to Rackspace because it was cheaper. It's pay for what you eat pricing, so you don't get a free allotment of bandwidth, but it's around ~$11 for a 256 meg instance. My biggest concern is that the Rackspace Cloud product doesn't seem as polished as Slicehost. Slicehost was a great service for newer users, with great documentation and help resources.

MichaelGG 15y ago

They advertise starting at 1.5cents/hr. Does that mean the cheapest "cloud server" I can get is $108? Versus the $20 or so I'm paying now? Edit: 1.5 cents is actually $10.8 a month. Nevermind :\.

trotsky 15y ago
$10.80 (just correcting the math, I don't actually know about their fees)
- MichaelGG 15y ago
  Oh duh, I put 15 cents in. How do I downvote myself?

rkischuk 15y ago

My first instinct is to plan a migration to Linode or Softlayer. I use SliceHost because I want to push a button and have a running server, and push another button to resize it in less than a minute. If I wanted more control, I'd be using EC2. I'm hoping someone with Rackspace Cloud experience can pipe in, but at a glance, it looks like a more bare-metal offering, like EC2, where you have to worry about more of the low-level concerns. Thoughts?

rkischuk 15y ago
I'm hearing from Rackspace that the merged offering will preserve the easy provision/upgrade features. No promises on the pricing, however.
sbarre 15y ago
I've been using Rackspace Cloud Servers for about a year now, and like everyone else is saying the control panel is a bit weak, but you do get "push a button, get a server" tools on there. I'm far from a super sysadmin but I've been able to create/remove servers, resize them and generally administer them competently without any trouble using the Rackspace control panel. That said, my needs are fairly simple. The most complex thing I've had to do is provision additional IPv4 addresses on one of the servers (for SSL hosting), and a support person did that for me in under 10 minutes via their web-based chat support. Unless you have a site that will actually use the gobs of bandwidth that Slicehost or Linode includes (and I don't), then Rackspace Cloud will end up being cheaper.. My single-IP servers cost me between $11 and $15 per month on average, based on bandwidth used.
wallfly 15y ago
No, you are incorrect. Slicehost technology is Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. Cloud servers and Slicehost slices are running in the same racks on the same hardware using identical technology stacks -- always have been. The control panel for managing a Rackspace Cloud account and products (including servers) is distinct from the Slicehost customer control panel, and the support teams were distinct groups of people. Now these two corporate structures and logical pools of resources will simply be merged under the name Rackspace Cloud Servers.

baggachipz 15y ago

I've been waiting for the final reason to force me to transition my sites off my Slicehost account. They've clearly been gutted and left in the dust; their plans haven't upgraded in specs while their competitors have. It's really too bad, Slicehost was so great before they were purchased.

patrickod 15y ago
They had the best customer service of anybody I've ever used. I'm sad to see them go
- blhack 15y ago
  Absolutely. Slicehost has been the example I've used for "doing it right" for quite some time. The chat was awesome. You could jump in there at pretty much any time and start talking to somebody who could help you immediately.
  - robszumski 15y ago
    Rackspace has live chat too...
- epochwolf 15y ago
  Rackspace has excellent 1 on 1 support with livechat.

starnix17 15y ago

I hope they keep their articles section, it was really helpful for me when I was setting up my first VPS.

colbyolson 15y ago
I totally agree. Those articles saved me a lot of time and were very helpful.
trustfundbaby 15y ago
Yup ... I was a linode customer but I set up my instance using the slicehost tutorials :\
subbu 15y ago
I don't use Slicehost anymore but I use their articles to setup any Linux machines. I am so dependent on these articles that I have saved an offline copy of these articles using HTTrack.
JonnieCache 15y ago
I have used also used their docs as well, while never having actually been a customer. Some of the best generalised VPS admin resources for newcomers out there, it'd be tragic if it went.

jcampbell1 15y ago

Is it just me, or is this an example of terrible corporate communication. As a slicehost customer, I don't give a shit about what Mark thinks about IPv6 and OpenStack. All I care about is what is going to change. He makes statements like "as seamless as possible". That doesn't have any meaning. If the major change is going to be a new control panel, and a different way of accessing support, then just say so.

plusbryan 15y ago
For what it's worth, the Mosso -> Cloud Sites transition was pretty seamless.
legooolas 15y ago
It's not just you. An email that starts with "I would like to start a dialogue about our plans for..." makes me think "uh-oh" immediately. Slicehost has only changed for the worse since their merge, from my experience with them :/ I recommended them to several friends and colleagues, but from what I've seen of Rackspaces offering I wouldn't be able to do that with them. RIP Slicehost :(
- brettnak 15y ago
  I totally agree. The control panel on Rack Space has kept me from ever recommending them. I love the Slicehost management panel. I also love the Linode panel. I do not love the Rack Space cp.
dablue 15y ago
Agree, it was a badly composed email... before reading the comments here, I comprehended the email as Slicehost was shutting down and my slice would be killed also. Quit the corporate talk and just say "Hey! We've decided to pull the plug from SliceHost but rest assured, we will safely migrate your slices to RackSpace." Put that in the first line of the email then followup with whatever else you want to say about the migration!
igrekel 15y ago
I agree that the email is just about things that have little interest to customers. My own questions were more along the lines of: - Will I need to restart my servers, reinstall, reconfigure them for the change? - How long will be the downtime? - Will the IP change (My DNS is managed elsewhere) - Will it still be 64 bit? - When will this happen approximately? - Will we able to choose when it happens for our instances? Also the fact that I haven't received the email myself is not reassuring at all. I am not going to just sit around and remain without a predictable migration path, be it a migration to Rackspace or elsewhere.

jen_h 15y ago

A real bummer. Have really enjoyed the uptime, stability, and performance Slicehost has given us over the last few years. I've got our web site configured to be brought up on AWS in a flash if needed--but we've never needed...uptime of 99.99% in the last year, 100% in the last 6 months. And crazy affordable. Their support/incidence response rocks, too. Vaya con Dios, Slicehost, I loved you much.

ericmoritz 15y ago

I've been putting off moving my Slicehost VPS to Rackspace Cloud. I'm glad I won't have to now.

amac 15y ago
Same. I guess it's a re-branding exercise and they'll do most of the heavy lifting for us.

jrockway 15y ago

This is my wakeup call to finally switch over to Linode.

polvi 15y ago

I'm one of the co-founders of Cloudkick (YC W09) and now part of the Rackspace. I wanted to reassure everyone that this is a migration, not "killing" off your slices. The Rackspace Cloud is based on the Slicehost technology, but has the full support and momentum of Rackspace behind it. If you have any questions, concerns, or would like to discuss this with anyone at Rackspace - please do not hesitate to reach out directly to me: alex.polvi@rackspace.com

yesimahuman 15y ago
I was a slicehost customer, then a rackspace customer, and now a linode customer. The biggest reason I love linode now is the control panel. Slicehost also had a good control panel, but the Rackspace Cloud CP is severely lacking. It's extremely slow and the DNS is in a really awkward spot (click a server and then click DNS to see a global DNS...it doesn't make sense). I was a fairly happy Rackspace Cloud customer but Linode is just a great experience. What is Rackspace doing to improve the cloud offering?
- polvi 15y ago
  Rackspace is investing heavily into the cloud. The Cloudkick acquisition was part of that. I am extremely happy to hear that the CP was one of your major pain points, because it is one of (if not the top) priority to improve. The team that is based in San Francisco is working directly on that project. If these sorts of problems are interesting to you, please let me know!
  - yesimahuman 15y ago
    That's great to hear. I'm excited for more competition in the space. That being said, I've raised the issue of the location of the DNS manager many times and have been told that it is by design and won't change. Go to the Linode or Slicehost CP and a link to the DNS manager is on the dashboard, where it should be. I just don't understand the reasoning for hiding it behind a specific server instance despite it being a globally applicable system. This is probably more annoying to me because of the slow speed of the control panel, meaning it takes a long time to get to the DNS manager. Best of luck with the improvements!

trey 15y ago

Just signed up for a year of linode... goodbye slicehost, you were great!

niels_olson 15y ago

For light use, I'm definitely glad I switched from slicehost to prgmr.com.

postfuturist 15y ago

I here a lot of talk about linode, but they are hardly the only competitor. I'm a very happy customer of ARP Networks http://www.arpnetworks.com/vps http://www.arpnetworks.com/vps . They support FreeBSD and OpenBSD in addition to Linux and have competitive pricing. I run 4 low traffic sites (2 rails, 1 sinatra, 1 django) on a $10 VPS without issue (using nginx, thin and tornado).

wewyor 15y ago
They are probably the best option if you are going to run openbsd or freebsd on a vps, though if you are going for linux I would say my experience with prgmr (for a similar price range) was much better than arpnetworks and if you want support/dns you should go with linode.
brndnhy 15y ago
These guys looks great. Thanks for the BSD tip. DNS and I'd migrate from Linode.

dualboot 15y ago

I'm most curious if this is a marketing decision or a result of an unsustainable business model.

trustfundbaby 15y ago

I remember agonizing over picking slicehost or linode 2/3 years ago ... So glad I went with linode.

heyimfromreddit 15y ago
What made you choose Linode?
- trustfundbaby 15y ago
  In the end it came down to price and size offering. Linode had a 128 or 192MB instance at the time that was insanely priced. Slicehost started at 256MB. There wasn't a lot to separate them otherwise.

seats 15y ago

Definitely a misleading title and kind of unfair to Rackspace. I founded Slicehost (with Matt Tanase) and I absolutely think this is the right thing to do and definitely is the best thing for existing Slicehost customers. Given that this is a public plan now I feel like I can share that during the acquisition process of Slicehost we debated heavily what the right thing was to do with the brand. It was honestly a very very tough call and at the time the thing we all (Matt, me and Rackspace) were most sensitive to was to not disrupt the Slicehost community. We succeeded in that goal but the net effect (unintentionally so) was to disconnect Slicehost from Rackspace's cloud roadmap and effectively strand the product. Unfortunately I think in hindsight I can say that our decision was probably the wrong call. I honestly think everyone would have been better off if we just ripped the band-aid early and tried to figure out how to make the core Cloud Server community out of the incoming Slicehost customers. Control panels, features, pricing, etc all change and in the long run are only ephemerally important. What matters is having your interests be in the direct path for the company that is serving you and as a Rackspace Cloud customer you'll have that, while as a Slicehost customer you did not (post acquisition). I definitely can see this from all sides and for Slicehost customers, all I can say is that at no point along the way did anyone (at Slicehost or Rackspace) ever have less than the best intentions for the brand and the community. There are some serious champions of Slicehost at Rackspace both in the form of former Slicehost employees still there (Paul Tomes, article site creator) and long time Rackers. Trust me that these guys are really working for the best for you all.

thesethings 15y ago
Thank you for making an awesome product in Slicehost. You mention that "...control panels...are only ephemerally important..." Many in this thread disagree. You can see it getting brought up over and over as a reason we loved Slicehost, and a reason we don't like other alternatives as much. I won't get too deep into UX theory here, so I'll just say this: people who make apps: if you hear the same comments over and over from your customers, they might be on to something interesting. I truly believe in the expression "listen to what your users do, not what they say." So i'm not gonna pretend every lil gripe we have about this is right. But there is definitely a pattern in this thread that Rackspace can learn from. [update: so far i've counted 18 mentions of the phrase "control panel" in this thread. it, and all user experience, matters a lot.]

wildmXranat 15y ago

What do I do as an administrator with regards to communication and guarantees of up-time when I communicate these concerns to my clients ? Here is my take: The longer Rackspace waits on transition details, the more customers will leave. I will if I don't see a concrete plan of migration, and I realize that these things are not easy.

ANH 15y ago

Rackspace needs to talk about pricing before they lose more customers. I'm a Slicehost customer and my main concern is what the price difference will be. About to set up a Linode account...

tmarkiewicz 15y ago
Two weeks ago we started migrating servers to Rackspace Cloud from Slicehost and it appears to be equivalent in pricing to slightly less expensive for us. YMMV depending on bandwidth, storage needs, RAM.

mrtron 15y ago

Let me explain why this is incredibly annoying for a long term (read: selfish) customer. I have a ton of apps running on my old slices. A client pays monthly for the one slice and it really doesn't look like it will cover costs with the shift to their 'cloud' servers. I really don't want to have to go and reconfigure several versions of python and django and several apps. I don't want to migrate databases. I don't want to move various processes that have been running without being touched for 3-5 years. The email doesn't give us any indication of the migration path. I don't care about your IPv6 problems or your OpenStack announcements. Even something like domains hasn't been addressed. I use the slicehost interface to manage a dozen or so domains and their subdomains. Am I going to have to shift nameservers and reconfigure these domains? Read their initial announcement to gain some perspective on how the acquisition was described. "Our number one goal is to continue delivering the Slicehost experience. In fact, we hope to make it even better." http://www.slicehost.com/rackspace http://www.slicehost.com/rackspace

StavrosK 15y ago
As far as I remember, Linode have a tool to migrate your DNS automatically. Migration, for me, was relatively painless, apart from the fact that I had to confirm each domain and change the IPs by hand. I'm sure you can write a script to do it, if you have many. If you're worried about costs, Linode's price is half Slicehost's. That should make the migration time worth it.
- macmac 15y ago
  Is https://github.com/Schultz/slicedns2linode https://github.com/Schultz/slicedns2linode what you mean?
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    Unfortunately I'm not exactly sure what I used... This looks like it, though.
  - logic 15y ago
    Thank you for posting this. Aside from one wildcard record (that shouldn't have worked anyway), it handled all of my zones perfectly.

brlewis 15y ago

I hope the flood of refugees doesn't make my Linode 1024 slower.

mhidalgo 15y ago

The server administration information on slicehost has been real useful for me, I hope they port that documentation over and it doesn't get lost. The articles were basically my introduction to setting up a web server, db , and installing language packages.

burke 15y ago

I'm seriously considering migrating from Slicehost to Linode. I've been a Slicehost customer for over 2 years. I was happy with them at first, but I don't think I've noticed a single thing change about their service since I signed up. Particularly the pricing. I'm now paying double what I would at Linode for a 1024MB VPS, and the control panel isn't as nice. These guys dropped the ball, big time. This announcement (Very vague -- I don't even understand what they're announcing) will probably just make me start migrating this weekend.

tomkarlo 15y ago

Slicehost was awesome but my more recent sites have been on AWS. If they're going to force me to transition my whole setup, I'm going to move it over there and make my life easier. Not very happy with this whole thing.

Interrante 15y ago

I'm Mark Interrante, from Rackspace, I wanted to let you know that we will have an FAQ on the transition posted at the Slicehost forums and on Hacker News in the next 24 hours.

Poiesis 15y ago
As of now, you have not appeared to live up to your promise. I don't see anything here, in the first few pages of new submissions, or on the forums first page. You do not make a compelling case for continuing with you through the transition.

patio11 15y ago

I have paid Slicehost a premium for a few years to avoid having to spend expensive engineer time on a migration to an unproven system which will almost certainly require downtime and break something in production. This announcement is absence-of-happy for me. I respect the desire to EOL an old product line holding up dev schedules, but this email has a lot of things which scare me (multi month dialogue about migration? Translation: "hit a button to reboot server" is not in the cards.) It also doesn't identify any benefit for me to stay: Rackspace's dev problems are not my problems because, prior to this email, my servers worked.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

antihero 15y ago

Didn't Rackspace just give up indymedia's servers with zero fight?

nenolod 15y ago
well, that's the danger of MLAT treaties in this time of multinational corporations. even though ahimsa.i.o was hosted in london, the datacenter facility was owned by rackspace which was based in the USA so they had to comply with the MLAT request initiated by the dutch. it was a shitty deal, but certainly not rackspace's fault completely.

chopsueyar 15y ago

You won't notice a thing. -Rackspace

evertonfuller 15y ago

Goodbye Slicehost. Hello Linode.

pilib 15y ago

About a year ago, when I was making plans to rent a vps for my personal sites and projects, Slicehost and Linode were the only real contenders. Slicehost had backups at the time, Linode didn't, but Linode had a slightly better offer overall. In addition to that, a review from uggedal.com favored Linode. Later, they doubled the memory, introduced backups, so in my mind, I made the right choice. I must say, Slicehost articles are great though. They are exceptionally well written. Not that Linode's articles are bad, but Slicehost articles are really good guides.

rhaygood 15y ago

I'm a Slicehost customer, and I just found out about all this from a blog - it's two days after this Hacker News post, and I still haven't received email about the matter. Rackspace, I'm very, very unimpressed.