Edgy Developments

I’ve been using Slicehost for over a year now, albeit just hosting the marketing page for TriggerFood and doing developmental testing, but have found them to be an exceptionally good hosting provider. Their management interface is easy to use and powerful, uptime has been perfect as far as I know, and various online help–especially their articles–have been incredibly useful. Now I’ve found something that’s further solidified my respect for them.

For my original slice, I set it up with Ubuntu 6.06 (the newest Long Term Support version at the time), which was tied to Ruby 1.8.4, and then set up nginx and mongrel for serving up my rails app. This was a reasonably good setup, but since then new and exciting things like Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and mod_rails (Phusion Passenger) have rolled out. After giving these some time to make sure any initial kinks were worked out, I started to think about upgrading. At the time I figured I’d have to reinstall my slice with the new Ubuntu, set up all the other software, and just do it all really quickly so my site wouldn’t be down that long. This hardly seemed ideal, and so eventually it dawned on me that I could just purchase a new slice, set it up, and then switch over and get rid of the old slice.

As compared with the first slice I got which took a couple of months to get a hold of, my new slice took just a couple of minutes to build. I was able to take my time and get all my Ruby, Rails, Apache and mod_rails stuff set up properly, and was pleased that things really did work well out of the box. Then I just changed the DNS records for my domain so they pointed to the new slice, and had a seamless transition to my new server. I kept my olde server around for a bit in case I needed to roll back, but after having the new server up and running for a while, I blew away the old one. Slicehost even prorated the monthly charge for having the 2nd slice, so if you do your server transition really quickly, you hardly pay anything.