Bye bye Slicehost… Hello Host Virtual

Data Center
Data Center (Photo credit: bandarji)

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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