The great thing about Slicehost was the size. They were big enough to be reliable but small enough to give a shit when you had a question on #slicehost on freenode.<p>PickledOnion's posts on the Slicehost articles page were top notch. I hope the quality continues.<p>It got to the point that I'd only recommend Slicehost, after a few bad experiences with media temple and the like.<p>DON'T FUCK IT UP, RACKSPACE.
Now I'm just waiting for GitHub to be acquired by SourceForge so another one of the companies I love doing business with can fall in the hands of one I'm trying to avoid like the plague.
On a business note, congratulations. On a personal note I'm not looking forward to this acquisition. For one I like the current price model, which is very reasonable. Rackspace is extraordinarily expensive. In my experience the customer service from the small slice host team is fantastic. I usually send a support email and receive a response within an hour. Hopefully we dont end up with account managers now.
I just hope Rackspace doesn't mess up slicehost to make it as "good" as mosso. I tried mosso before running away to slicehost.<p>Fingers crossed because moving sites ain't fun.
This has really left me cold.<p>I love Slicehost, and have received nothing but great service and support from them. Their articles are indispensable, and their control panel is simply world class.<p>What I dislike is Rackspaces shady pricing practise, the fact that whenever I've dealt with Rackspace as I've come away with quotes that were wildly excessive, and generally the view that Rackspace are a large company focused on new sales through hard-selling practises rather than focusing on customer service and their existing customer base.<p>To me, Rackspace are the most-reputed of a very bad bunch (the best of the worst). Slicehost are the shining star of a new breed (the best of the best).<p>As a Slicehost customer I really do not want to see Slicehost become anything like Rackspace, at all. Instead I want to see the opposite, Rackspace become more like Slicehost. But will that happen? Well... did the Slicehost guys get Rackspace board seats? There's your answer.<p>I'll wait and see, but whilst I had loyalty to Slicehost and the people there I won't feel loyalty towards Rackspace. Should I feel any affect on the service I receive, through price increase, impact on backups, downtime, etc... I'll jump.<p>As others have said: DON'T FUCK IT UP, RACKSPACE.<p>Not least because with this many entrepreneurs here with growing ventures, it might not be the wisest business decision to piss them all off.
Awesome, but I hope they don't change pricing too much.<p>edit:
Looks like they will be under the Mosso line?
<a href="http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers.jsp</a>
Let's hope they don't do to Slicehost what they did to Webmail.us after acquiring them. If they do, you can expect huge increases in prices and a focus more on corporate/"big" clients.
It seems that Rackspace is going to turn Slicehost into "Mosso Cloud Servers": <a href="http://cloud.rackspace.com/cloudservers.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://cloud.rackspace.com/cloudservers.jsp</a><p>If you read "Included with Every Cloud Server" it reads just like the Slicehost homepage including this gem: "Slicehost management portal for reboots and software installs".<p>I'm wondering whether Rackspace will keep around the Slicehost brand (ala HP/Compaq) or just put everything under the Mosso brand. I am excited for the possibility of an S3-like storage system under the same roof as Slicehost. Maybe Amazon will start thinking of making lower-powered EC2 instances to compete with Mosso?
We run <a href="http://www.edmodo.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.edmodo.com</a> on slicehost and love it. I'm a bit worried about the rackspace aquisition, but giving them the benefit of doubt for now.
I've used both Rackspace and Slicehost in production settings, and they both have their drawbacks and advantages.<p>We moved to the 'premiere rails hosting provider' (I won't say which one, but it's the current one, not the old one) and after moving to their 'managed' environment I realised that the grass isn't always greener.<p>Rackspace were not able to manage our application, but it's been more effort having to manage the managers so to speak, verify everything they did, and now we have a significantly more complicated setup.<p>In short, trying not to go off topic, I found Rackspace to be quite damn good at what they did (hardware, and provisioning). I could get a new box up and going in 24-48 hours with them, built to my specifications and sealed and delivered. The current premier provider take 'up to a week' to provision us a new VPS web slice, go figure.
My company's beta testing app is hosted at SliceHost. I'm happy for the SliceHost guys but given Rackspace's reputation I was not very happy with this acquisition. Maybe it's cuz I'm afraid SliceHost might lose it's small tech company service...
Question about terminology:<p>Is a slicehost slice considered 'cloud computing'?<p>Scoble and others are comparing slicehost to EC2 and amzn web services, but doesn't slicehost compete more with traditional dedicated hosting and other vps providers?
I really like the guys at slicehost. They can answer all your technical questions in a few short sentences. They are pretty quick and responsive. Hope Rackspace uses these skills along with their servers.