In a previous post I raved about the service and support I receive from RimuHosting and their VPS plans. Their service remains unmatched, but I’ve been using another hosting provider for some other projects that is also very good.

SliceHost.com has been around for maybe a year now. It was quite the buzz when it came out - and apparently is still since setting up one of their VPS plans requires you to wait for up to several months on a waiting list.

What I like about SliceHost is that everything I normally contact RimuHosting to do for me, I can do myself via SliceHost’s admin interface. This mainly involves adding RAM or, since I do a lot of playing around on my slices, reinstalling a clean OS. For instance, yesterday, I wanted a fresh start on my RimuHosting VPS with the latest version of Debian. So, after backing up some databases, I submitted a support ticket and it was done. I’m still hugely impressed that I receive responses from RimuHosting within 5 minutes of me sending an email. And, after I confirmed what I wanted to do, it was another 5 minutes before my VPS was entirely rebuilt.

However, in SliceHosts slice manager, I can go straight to a “rebuild” option, select the distro I want installed, and does this for my automatically.

SliceHost Slice Manager Rebuild Option

Also notice some of the other cool options that you have right at your fingertips. The resize option allows you to add/remove RAM at a whim and billing is automatically taken care of.

As for performance, I must say I’m quite impressed. I have two slices at SliceHost. One runs drupal 5.x and the other runs a Ruby on Rails app. Both of these sites are very performant. Granted, neither of these have much traffic, but I have done some load testing and been quited impressed with the results.

The other think I like about SliceHost is the price. With slice’s starting at $20 per month, you can’t go wrong

One thing that both of these companies do well is maintain a wiki and “HOWTO” section to help you with common sys admin tasks. I commonly refer to both of their help sites for figuring things out when I need a hand. You can find RimuHosting’s here and SliceHost’s here.

So, if you’re not in a huge hurry to get a hosting plan going, sign up on SliceHost’s waiting list to see for yourself.

For full disclosure, I am not affiliated with either RimuHosting (rimuhosting.com) or SliceHost (slicehost.com) - I just like their services.