Slicehost Archives - Sky's Blog

Hosting- Rackspace on steroids and on to WPEngine (for some)

15 December, 2012 by sky Leave a Comment

Oh man, I am asked all the time how to pick a hosting company. And although I do all my hosting in just two places now, the evolution has been interesting, and I don’t have an answer that I completely like yet. I can see that for most people, you have to go with something easy, and the domain registrars provide easy solutions – like Network Solutions and GoDaddy, for instance. But if you’re a geek and can handle your own simple installations, then a virtual private server can be a tempting idea.

Here’s my history of hosting on the Internet. [Read more…]

How will I manage? (the cloud)

14 January, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

I had a meeting with Alex Polvi (a founder) and Bob Hrdinsky of Cloudkick today. Over a Thai lunch. And then we followed up with a short discussion-demo at their office at the foot of Potrero Hill where I met most/all of their US tech experts.

Cloudkick runs a slick service that lets you manage your Slicehost and Rackspace/Mosso cloud servers (both brands are owned by and housed in Rackspace facilities), providing some data visualization in addition. Of course you could manage your servers using the control panels provided by Slicehost and Rackspace, but Cloudkick’s one-layer-removed management adds some unique extras. And they can “automatically” migrate your Amazon EC2 servers over to Rackspace if you’re interested in that. I have nine virtual servers on S&R (as I’ll call the two services) and signed up for the free Cloudkick services almost three months ago. They were voted Best in Show at Under the Radar (see Cloudkick writeup and video). The company is a little under a year old. It was kick-started by a seed investment by Y-Combinator, and recently obtained an angel round of investment. [Read more…]

Slicehost- Tomcat installation on a tiny virtual server

7 September, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Geek alert! This article is for Slicehost geeks only.

Talk about playing on the edge, I almost fell off this time. I have eight slices (virtual servers, that is) on Slicehost (which is now owned by Rackspace) and believe me they are tiny!^[1] But they can serve low-volume to medium-volume web sites pretty well. For instance, Shaping Youth (several thousand visitors a day) and GirlsHorseClub are on these little servers and they serve up pretty rapidly.^[2] Nice thing about Slicehost is that any host can be scaled up from the tiny size to 16x that size, and because it’s cloud computing, you can also bring up multiple instances of any server and have them share load. This allows me to implement the traditional three-tiered architecture (web/application/database) quite well without having to worry about whether my servers will be able to handle the load because I can scale ’em up whenever I need to.

But, the catch is that when you start with the tiniest slice (256MB RAM) you really have to fine-tune your operating system and applications in order to get good performance out of them. [Read more…]

Did PHP kill the Java radio star?

10 April, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Responding to Infoworld Did PHP kill the Java radio star?

Zend’s CEO, Andi Gutmans, claims that PHP is disrupting Java. Meaning that PHP has gotten a significant toehold and is dislodging Java from its position as the granddaddy of server-side web applications frameworks[1]. I take the word disrupting in its modern sense of disruptive technology – a technology that significantly differs from the standard paradigm and whose effect would have been hard to predict, based on the “rules” of the standard paradigm.

I am a long-time Java-user (9 years) and I agree that PHP is a real contender in the web applications sphere… and would like to make some additional observations. [Read more…]