I'm surprised at all the people still using Slicehost. They are good people, and run a nice service, but in terms of money, you are leaving it on the table when compared to Linode:
I was with SH myself, and before I wrote that article, I dropped them an email asking about the 64 vs 32 bit thing, and was simply informed that they have no plans for 32 bit, so I went ahead and switched, then wrote my article and have been happy since. I sincerely hope the SH guys will get competitive again, at which point I'll gladly update my article.
Also, something that Linode was missing for a while was backups. They're rolling them out now:
Agreed. Their articles are a really great resource as well (and aren't Slicehost specific). They have a ton of step by step guides for OS setup, Apache, MySql, Postfix, etc...
you are leaving it on the table when compared to Linode
In my case, the "left on the table" amount is about 1/100th of my sales. From last week. That doesn't exactly justify me dropping everything and spending my freaking expensive engineering time figuring out how to migrate without causing breakage or downtime.
When my credit card expired, Linode deactivated my account and never responded to my emails after that. If I had data that I needed on that machine, I would've lost it forever.
They're cheap, so I still use them for personal projects, but personally, I'd never trust my business with them.
Wow. I just had the same situation with Slicehost. They notified me about the problem, said that there was a five day grace period, and that I could always contact them if I had any problems. They generally replied within the hour to all my e-mails.
I use Slicehost, after looking at Linode's pages these features seem to be missing:
Bandwidth is pooled between all of your slices.
Money is pooled -- if you pay a certain amount, you get the "annual discount", but then you can use that for paying for whichever slices each month. And you can bring slices up and down whenever you want to, and pay a prorated amount.
There's a nice API so you can automate a lot of your activities.
On the other hand, Linode does seem to be a bit cheaper on RAM and a lot cheaper on bandwidth.
Bandwidth at Linode is also pooled for Linodes withing the same datacenter (of which they have 4). You can also bring up any number of Linodes and bring them down whenever you want. You will be charged for the full month but if you bring them down, they will give you credit for the unused portion of the month (rate is per day). Linode also has an API for their DNS service but I haven't really used it so I won't comment much on it. In short, Linode is a pretty good deal.
We (Linode) announced a public beta of our new backup service in our NJ facility yesterday and hope to have it rolled out to all four locations shortly: http://tinyurl.com/db8tlf
http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
I was with SH myself, and before I wrote that article, I dropped them an email asking about the 64 vs 32 bit thing, and was simply informed that they have no plans for 32 bit, so I went ahead and switched, then wrote my article and have been happy since. I sincerely hope the SH guys will get competitive again, at which point I'll gladly update my article.
Also, something that Linode was missing for a while was backups. They're rolling them out now:
http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/03/backup-service-enters-beta...