This morning I finished configuring my SliceHost VPS. It went fairly well, being slightly Linux challenged, the Slicehost wiki, forums and support team helped me get everything done in about 4 hours.

Every slice they offer comes barebones, meaning how the various distributions ship. Slicehost simply adds the needed xen tools and default SSH configuration.

The only hick-up I encountered, was that Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) had courier mail enabled by default.

Having chosen a 512 MB slice, with the plan of running Nginx, Mongrel and MySQL, I didn’t want the overhead of the mail server.

It was easy enough to remove the startup scripts, once I familiarized myself with the proper init.d commands.

With Hosted Solutions and Amazon EC2, I relied on their ACL/Firewalls to keep the riffraff out. ON my slice I had to setup iptables. Which was amazingly simple, specially compared to Leopard’s retarded firewall.

The optional backup service lets you take snapshots and have period backups of your slice. If anything goes awry you can restore at anytime through their slice management application. A great value for only $10 more a month!

Slicehost billing model lets you to add and remove slices as needed, only paying for what you use. This is similar to how Amazon EC2 works.

While they aren’t in the same game, on demand computing, SliceHost appears to solve my business challenge of scaling over time, without purchasing tons of hardware and rack space.

Over the next month I will see how performance compares as I move several projects.

Very nice for $48 a month!

Two big thumbs up so far.