Just sent SliceHost an email, got an answer within minutes:
Hi Alex,
Unfortunately, we don't have any word on future pricing at the moment, but we are aware of Linode's recent price drops.
Thanks,
--
Tim - Slicehost Support
I've had sites on linode and slicehost, and have found Slicehost to have less downtime, packet loss, network problems (unreachable), and so on. I'm satisfied with both, overall.
That is very curious I've had a linode in dallas for a long time (2 or more years) and the only downtime that I have experienced on my server is from those few (I think it has been less than 10 times and they weren't more than a few hours) times everyones dallas linode went down.
I have one in Dallas, too. Nothing curious about it, take a look at http://linode.typepad.com/
Perhaps my requirements or expectations are higher than your own. The downtime hasn't been excessive, but sometimes, it is down for an hour before I see anything on their status update blog, and meanwhile, I'll have received a few notes from site users and advertisers.
There are three incidents listed in the past two weeks of packet loss, routing issues, and so on for 1-3 hours. There were other issues in May, I don't know where those are listed now.
Yes, it's only going down for a couple of hours at a time. Considering I'm using the server for images for a medium traffic website - an hour or two is VERY noticeable to my customers, and as noted, it adds up to more than the downtime on my Slicehost account (St. Louis).
Slicehost, much like Apple, doesn't want customers who primarily care about how much server space they are getting for the money.
Slicehost sells themselves on having superior support. (Now, I don't know if Slicehost support is /actually/ that much better than Linode, but if it is, the price difference could be a reasonable price to pay for the customers who need the most help.)
That's true. On the other hand, Linode is competitive on price and service. Every ticket I've submitted has gotten a response within a couple hours. That's pretty good considering how much I'm paying. Honestly, I don't know why someone would get a vps from a different company.
I'm happy you are happy, and am not trying to convert you to Slicehost. That said, a bit on my thought process: I've been with them for years, switching costs are non-trivial in terms of my time (and switching could break stuff), and I have absolute and total confidence in them to treat me well.
I just checked my email. In the last year, I've had three incidents with Slicehost, all connected to issues experienced when migrating VPSes. All were resolved in minutes.
Not to knock Linode, or Rackspace Cloud, or EC2, or whatever, but none of them have ever been in the foxhole with me at 3 AM when the server was down and got it back up before customers noticed.
I think both have great support. They both have active and lively IRC channels where staff hang out. It's usually very quick to resolve issues with slicehost and linode.
The pain point for me at slicehost was bandwidth - they charge a lot, linode charge a little. Also far more options on linode etc etc once I moved that all added up to a better experience.
I haven't checked for a while, but when I compared Slicehost and Linode pricing, they were about the same. I stayed on Slicehost for that reason. Slicehost has been great to me, and I like their IRC channel. I see no reason to switch. I guess I'll go compare again soon and if there's a big difference I'll be obliged to switch (very poor), but I haven't had any trouble with Slicehost.
Excellent comparison, and jibes with my own experience switching from Slicehost to Linode -- noticeably improved performance in CPU and IO. I've started recommending Linode, and now that they've upped the RAM, I will recommend them even more.
What is preferable about Slicehost compared to Linode? They seem extremely similar to me (I've researched it a fair amount), except that Linode's prices are way better.
I've been with Linode for over a year and never regretted it. This RAM upgrade and a disk space upgrade earlier certainly help!
I think that many choose Slicehost because they don't care about price all that much and/or believe it will be more stable (which may or may not be true)
I, for one, prefer to use VPS that is cheaper than that, offers more traffic and I believe will still be good enough.
...despite Rackspace's well-publicized downtime, which has prompted prominent sites to move away from them?
One of my local competitors recently, proudly, informed me that they were about to launch a new hosting service supported by Rackspace. I smiled, and congratulated them, and started planning the marketing campaign I'd like to run when Rackspace goes down and takes my competitors' clients with them.
> Rackspace's downtime just makes more noise because lots of well-known sites are hosted there.
Not as many as there used to be.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but it's one thing when my site goes down because I did something dumb, and a whole 'nother thing when a site goes down, these days, because a data center is having a problem. I just don't understand why someone would assume that downtime was inevitable and not choose to minimize that risk as much as possible.
Some would suggest that the best way to minimize that risk is not to look at who hasn't had downtime in the last two years, but instead to host your app with more than one provider.
(of course, if you take that route, you probably want to go with two different low-cost providers.)
It's true that price isn't everything, and to some degree, web hosting is a funny market: it's really easy/visible to compete on price/features, but you only notice the service when things go awry (at least for someone like me who doesn't particularly need hand holding), and then you really want to be dealing with people who know their stuff and take their jobs seriously.
That said, I've never got the impression Linode was giving me anything less in terms of service than similar outfits.
Actually, HN did not switch over (at least, that comment didn't say it switched over). It says the main YC site WWW.ycombinator.com (and NOT news.ycombinator.com) switched, and that news.yc is serving just static content from slicehost.
