Ok so I’ve moved hosts for some of our projects and sites.

This is a pretty big thing, at the moment we have a dedicated server with LayeredTech, a VPS with MediaTemple and 2 GridService accounts with MediaTemple.

It’s getting a little messy, so I’m consolidating everything to a MediaTemple VPS and a Slicehost (my new account) 1024 slice.

Forgetting the rest of the move for a bit, and the reasons behind it, let’s talk about slicehost.

I’m 1 day into my hosting experience with them at the moment, and so far I’m learning a lot, and wondering if this was the right choice.

I’m familiar with Linux to a good extent, I’d rate myself a 6/10, I’m no guru but I can do everything we need without any dramas.

The thing with slicehost is that there’s no web control panel as such, there’s no cpanel, or plesk, no way to add domains to an account, no simple web hosting. You have to know what you’re doing and you really have to have a good grasp of Linux before you even think of hosting with them because most of your time will be spent in shell.

Somewhat like MediaTemple where you have a control panel, you can manage your slices and general bits from a web interface, you also have DNS control, but that’s it. No email or anything. It’s very ‘heavy’ on the manual labour side of things, as far as reading and typing to get things setup, not your typical institutive user interface with 3 clicks to get a site up and working.

So all that scary part aside, there’s lots of documentation around for slicehost, so it’s not too bad.

Also, after purchasing my slice it was operational in less than 2 minutes.

At the moment I’ve just installed Ruby, Rails and MySQL, so far so good.

To get this far I’ve used the slicehost wiki on how to gets started with your new Ubuntu slice…

http://wiki.slicehost.com/doku.php?id=get_started_with_your_new_ubuntu_slice

I picked Ubuntu mostly because we run Ubuntu servers for development internally, but it’s also very well supported by Slicehost.

The Ubuntu wiki is pretty big for slicehost, check it out here http://wiki.slicehost.com/doku.php#ubuntu

Next on my list is to get LiteSpeed installed.