As I wrote previously, I started looking around for a new hosting provider, as Layered Tech is jacking up their prices too much. This isn’t something I consider ‘fun’, as it will involve a lot of time swapping things over, with the potential for problems, but the amount of money disappearing every month is too much to ignore at this point.

After some dithering, I finally went ahead and spent some money for a minimal slice at Slicehost. Linode seems pretty competitive too, but I more or less flipped a mental coin. I was actually ready to go ahead the other day, but I stopped to think some more after seeing that Slicehost has been acquired by Rackspace. In terms of seeing hard working people rewarded for their efforts, I am of course happy for the guys at Slicehost, but it also leaves a few questions:

• Sometimes, perhaps not immediately, but after a while, there is less incentive to bust your butt if you cashed in in a big way.

• Rackspace is not my kind of hosting outfit: they don’t even list their prices where people can see them, like Slicehost, Layered Tech, and most everyone else does. I’ve heard they’re good, but quite expensive. I don’t need ‘managed’ servers – I can do that myself.

• The FAQ says that Slicehost will continue as a going concern in its own right, but there’s always the chance that they were acquired for their tech, and that the FAQ just says that they will continue to operate to keep their current clients from bolting.

Of course, good things could come out of the deal too, so I decided to put my paranoia aside and test the waters. There are a lot of things to like about a system like Slicehost’s: it’s relatively quick and easy to set up new slices, fiddle with the resources that each slice has, and so on, compared with a physical server. Furthermore, they have a reputation for not ‘overbooking’ their servers, which is why I wanted to get away from a VPS in the first place, many years ago.

Setting up a slice was very quick and easy, but unfortunately got off to a rough start: their “fraud detection” system had a problem with me being in a different place than my billing address. Luckily, they were very fast at correcting the problem. As an aside, I think that fraud detection is probably best left to the credit card companies, although of course I don’t really know their business, so maybe that particular check has saved them some money/frustration in the past.

Upgrading the Slicehost Ubuntu to Intrepid

In any case, once I got it up and running, I wanted to test out the upgrade to Intrepid, as that’s going to be out in less than a week, and I might as well upgrade while I have ‘fresh’ servers to play with, and prior to installing a bunch of stuff.

It went very well. I did a do-release-upgrade -d, hit ‘yes’ to everything, rebooted, and everything was fine! Admittedly, I don’t have anything running on the server yet, so that kept things short and sweet, and didn’t require the upgrade of various systems which might have had troubles, but so far so good

If you’d like to sign up for Slicehost, it looks like they give you a referral code. Mine can be utilized by going here.