Migrated to Rackspace
Well, Slicehost is coming to an end. I think many people are sad about that, if there aren't...There should be. It was an amazing hosting company. So amazing that mega hosting company Rackspace purchased them a while back. If you don't migrate yourself, they will migrate for you...To Rackspace! That's the good news.
I've been avoiding the inevitable migration from Slicehost to Rackspace... But over the past few days here I have done it. I love Rackspace just as much as Slicehost and would always recommend them to everyone out there.
What does that mean? Well, depending on how much bandwidth you run through, you will likely be paying a little less per month for hosting. The control panel does not have as many features as Slicehost's did...Though the design is a little neater if you're a fan...I'm a minimalist (w/o things being fugly), so I like Slicehost's manager design better...But Rackspace does have a cool API.
I've used many hosts over the years, for myself and for clients...You name it, I've likely tried it...Slicehost, Rackspace, VPS.net, MediaTemple, Lunarpages, AptHost, HostGator, GoDaddy (yuck - please stick to domain names only), and many many more... Even back in the day, geocities! Yea! haha. So at the end of a lot of banging my head on the desk, if you are out there looking for a good host, I would absolutely reccommend Rackspace. Best hosting company I have ever seen hands down. I really do bet I've seen (and worked with) more than your average bear too.
That said. Hosting. What is the hosting landscape in 2011? Are you on a shared host? Get off. Now. If you're a web designer/developer then you should be on a VPS by now. Cost was a pretty hard thing to get around, but Rackspace has a 256MB slice (Slicehost terminology, I mean cloud server size or whatever they call it) and it's going to run you around $12/mo. With bandwidth maybe a little more like $15 tops. I was around long enough to see shared hosting dip to like $7/mo. I have no clue what it's like now...It should be free. Regardless. Switch to a VPS. Sure, you'll need to setup the server from scratch, but there's enough tutorials out there and the only way for you to progress as a web developer is to tinker with a VPS.
When you let technology and your web server limit what you can do...You limit what you can learn and do as a web developer.
Rackspace has some really great servers with their cloud server offering. They also have cloud sites which as far as I'm concerned basically replaces shared hosting as we know it.
What else in 2011? Well, even in 2010, likely 2009 we have this really cool new thing PaaS. "Platform as a Service" ... Things like OpenShift from RedHat, CloudFoundry from VMWare (hey, they are down the road from me!), Orchestra.io, and a whole ton of Ruby services. These services let you deploy web apps (the cool word for sites when they do more than just show a web page) in the "cloud" (the cool word for having essentially mirrored copies of your site on multiple servers so perhcance one go down, your site is still visible by the world and scalability or in other words, "many hands make light work").
These services are great because you just run a command (I imagine it's not long before some IDE has it bulit in, if not already) and voila! Your site is out on the internet.
The future is cool. Well, the present...Sorta. A lot of these services still can't quite get a grasp on the beast that is PHP. Orchestria.io by far is the best for PHP. The other PaaS' have varied support for PHP when it comes to MongoDB. They'll get there though.
So, just as I have migrated...This little blog post is a reminder that you too should probably take a look at your hosting situation and think about a little spring ... er late summer or fall cleaning. I can't tell, I'm all out of whack, where I live spring felt like winter and now late summer/fall feels like mid-summer.
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