So this afternoon I took a little break from running unit tests to head to the store and pick up a couple things. When I got back, I noticed I was no longer on IRC, and my client was reporting it couldn’t connect to the bouncer I run to stay online. I tried to SSH in to see if the bouncer had died, and discovered I couldn’t connect.
And couldn’t ping the box.
And couldn’t get this site to come up in a browser.
This site’s hosted at SliceHost on a nice beefy VPS, and they provide a nice web-based interface for checking on server status, so I logged in there and found I couldn’t get a console to come up. Diagnostics reported that the server was indeed down and said support had already been contacted.
At which point I popped open my inbox and saw not one but two emails from Slicehost support: one telling me their monitoring had noticed the server was down, and another a few minutes later saying there’d been some sort of hardware problem and they were swapping it out.
I was, it goes without saying, impressed; I’m not used to consumer hosting noticing and working on an issue before the consumer (in this case, me) is even aware of the problem, but that’s what they’d apparently been doing.
So I sat tight for a bit, and then saw another email come in telling me that the hardware swap was done, and the server was being brought back online. A minute later I had SSH access again, and watched the box do the usual confused dance of bringing all its services back up; a couple minutes later, everything was running and stable again.
Elapsed time: about thirty minutes. For nearly fifteen of them I wasn’t even aware of any problems, but the Slicehost folks were and were on it. That’s what I call service.
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Agreed. I’m a SliceHost customer as well. A very satisfied one.
Thanks for the kind words, James. We strive to do our best when things like this happen.
This has largely been why I’ve been so happy with SliceHost for so long. Three cheers for SliceHost!
I had a similar experience around 6 months ago, I’m also very happy with their service so far.
I don’t think that a hosting company that monitors their servers deserves this much credit. I have a few co-located boxes for personal projects and, even though the services they run aren’t that critical, I still monitor them using Nagios. It’s not hard and it should be something that every systems administrator sets up as a matter of course.
I do, however, agree that 20 minutes down-time for a hardware failure is impressive. I wonder if they just yanked the disks from one box and jammed them in a spare?
@Rupert
I totally agree with your point regarding monitoring. However, I think your missing the bigger point here… James was well informed throughout the entire process and slicehost was proactive about notifying him about the issues. Seemingly, they notified him of a potential problem before they even knew what the exact nature of the problem was. I’ve been with webhosts in the past where my sites go down, I contact support and they act like they don’t know what the problem is and indicate that they “are looking into it.” Hours go by and they tell me it is fixed, but won’t divulge any more information regarding the problem. In short, they seem very lackadaisical in their approach to communicating a problem. Sounds to me though like slicehost is being very straight-forward in both dealing with the issue and communicating with their customers throughout the process.
Slicehost is run by a bunch of geeks, who know how to communicate with their customers because their customers are also geeks. They have found a process and style that works really well for them and is apparently making their customers very vey happy (juding from a google and twitter search i just did on them.)
Well, thats my 2 cents. I’ve got to go sign up for a slice now!
the same thing happened also to me. they’ve swapped a hd immediately and i was happy
I guess I’m also in the “color me unimpressed” category.
Any VPS provider worth their salt is gonna do this. I haven’t personally had such an experience with the host I use (Linode), but that’s only because I haven’t had a failure.
~JW
I’ve used many (too many) VPS hosting services and in my experience - none even comes close to SliceHost. Not just because their support is proactive and truly 24/7, but also the service is incredible: under-a-minute server provisioning, instant resize, wonderful control panel etc.
SliceHost is THE developer’s hosting, hands-down, no question.
I just hope nothing (that works now) will change with the Rackspace acquisition.
So jealous. Note to self: never lock into a multi-year plan with a cheap company.
Haha, clicked on this through HackerNews with the title “Slicehost is smarter than I am” and was expecting them to have done something warranting a reaming.
Glad to have been mistaken.
I don’t use Slicehost myself; but to the previous comments regarding how this type of behavior should be business as usual: plenty of upset customers with other providers have shown that this is sadly not always the case.
Kudos to Slicehost for being one of the good guys, and to James for recognizing it. It’s easy to find bad reviews of providers, but a lot harder to find dependable testaments to good service.
Slicehost has been a fire and forget for 2 years for us, and I am incredibly happy and recommend them to anyone i encounter. Glad to see there is such an outpouring of support for them.
The reason they are so good is because they approach hosting like a programming problem, and automate their whole operation. This makes so much sense, and it shows, not only in their prices, but also their services and attention to detail.
I’m also an extremely happy slicehost customer. They provide a level of support and transparency that just isn’t there with any of the other VPS providers, particularly the ones that offer “just a little more” bandwidth or diskspace or whatever. Slicehost is worth every penny and more.
One more vote for slicehost, here. Same sort of thing happened to me. I was actually working on my slice and everything seemed fine. I left for lunch and when I got back there were the same two emails. They had everything back up and running,I wouldn’t have even noticed.
Compare that to a few other hosts I’ve worked with, in my experience that kind of service is pretty rare.
Back to my slice!
We run a number of slices as well on Slicehost and are very satisfied customers. The slicehost guys really know what they’re doing.
My Ubuntu slice has been wonderful. It serves about 10 domains (with a couple popular sites). They all use databases and some of them have seen their share of traffic spikes. It also runs my SVN server which actually gets used by a number of people. Every time I have run into an issue I couldn’t figure out, Slicehost support has been waiting for me in the support chat channel, and has helped me resolve my issue quickly (even at late hours and on Thanksgiving Day).
Days running: 348 Total downtime: 0 minutes and 0 seconds