Recently I was ranting about Slicehost being assimilated by Rackspace and how bleak its future seems. I have a few virtual machines hosted by Slicehost and tried out Rackspace to see what I was in for. Deeply saddened by their service I started looking for a new home.
Linode looked promising at first – native IPv6 was up there in my requirements – but their downfall was US-only data centres. Next up was Host Virtual, not only did they have native IPv6 connectivity but they also had data centres across the US, Europe and Asia – perfect!
So, I jumped right in to Host Virtual … creating a small 256MB server (just $9.95/month) for starters:
- Sign-up was straight-forward and all in one page, name/address and billing details all done for in one go – account created.
- As I was a new customer they had to validate my information – nothing to do but wait 10 minutes for them to do it in the background.
- Sure enough, 10 minutes later and my account is active and ready to rock.
Next, to deploy my VM:
- You’re presented with a list of pre-canned operating system builds (CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu etc. etc.)
- Pick a data centre – several US ones, London, Amsterdam, India.
- Enter a couple of details (passwords), and whack the deploy button.
- Allocated IPv4 & IPv6 addresses immediately, OS build takes about 2 minutes.
In all it took 14 minutes from clicking “Sign-up” to getting logged in over SSH.
I am thoroughly impressed, a quick poke around the network/routes/bandwidth and everything looks good. Going to get settled in and make full use of their money back guarantee if it doesn’t work out. Slicehost I am sorry to say, I think I have found a new home…
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