Josh Huckabee

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.

I've been through the gamut of web hosts. I started on a shared host when I was using ASP.NET with Microsoft and SQL Server. The site worked and support was ok, nothing to brag about. I soon found out that my host couldn't support what I was wanting to do (host an open-source CMS called DotNetNuke) so I soon switched to another host that would. Things worked fine, but my sites always just seemed a bit sluggish.

I soon learned that if I wanted things to work exactly how I wanted them, I had two choices: 1) Buy a server and all the software that goes along with it and house it in a colocation facility somewhere (too expensive for me at the time), or 2) find a dedicated server hosting plan where I can do what I wanted to the server to make it run optimally for what I was doing. So, I chose option 2 and found a local company that, I must say, did a great job - CrystalTech.