Hello, Slicehost!
December 20th, 2007 by Jerry
I have finally gotten around to moving this site to slicehost.com. Dreamhost was fine for what it cost, but for any kind of web development projects, it was usually less than snappy on the responsiveness meter, and that makes web development very tiring. Slicehost gives me a private, dedicated virtual server. That means that the processing, storage, and memory resources allotted to me are mine, and nobody else with an account on the same physical web server can ever use up those resources. This means there’s usually a waiting list for new accounts, because they won’t cram more accounts onto the existing servers. To serve more customers, they have to install and setup a new machine in their server farm.
This also means that they leave all the setup of my virtual web server to me. They have fresh, custom Linux installations available (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.), but I have to install and configure my web serving software (lighttpd, PHP, MySQL, etc.) This endeavor is not for the faint of heart. It’s taken years of tinkering on my own Linux machines to get comfortable with setting up everything on my own, although the impressive progress of Linux in recent years has made it much better. Still, this is not your grandmother’s web hosting provider.
Usually, moving my website or making any serious changes to it requires a site redesign, but I’m currently lazy busy with other projects. I chose to wrap up the code and database and plug it into the new server as-is.
Also, since they call their virtual servers “slices,” I lovingly named my slice “velveeta.”
-JK