Just as I’m in the process of moving my sites off Slicehost onto Linode completely I spotted a tweet of someone asking about the advantages of of the big green “L” over SliceHost.

Well although I did a post reviewing the top developer webhosts a while back I thought I’d jump into answering this very question as I’m slap bang in the middle of both.

I’ve been using Slicehost now for a little over a year and Linode I first signed upto about 6 months ago. When I first started using Slicehost it was a great breath of fresh air. VERY developer friendly with a great community and nice features.

However, I’d begun to get a bit itchy since the connection between me and my Slice has often been a bit slow. Whether this was down to the Atlantic gap or something on my end I wanted to test a few other hosts out. So on I hunted and eventually found Linode. They seemed to have a lot of the same philosophy to Slicehost with a strong developer focus and some nifty features. One of which was the web console access to your node (a feature of Slicehost that’s been indispensible).

I signed up for a low-end account to try it out and was immediately hit by the choices on offer. Not only do you get a huge range of kernel options (64 and 32 bit) but you can also set up multiple disk images on the storage you get.

Then after sign up and image creation I was into the dashboard. WOAH – is pretty much all I said at that point. You’re suddenly hit by a selection of stats and gtraphs that tell you everything you could want to know about your nodes. Bandwidth usage over time, CPU, memory, etc. Not only that you can setup custom alerts for when you’re node is using too many resources.

So have I completed my move yet? Not quite but I will do soon. I have 1 or 2 sites left on Slicehost and I downgraded my plan to the lowest I can. Once I’ve finished my move over I’ll be shutting down my Slice and upgrading my Node.

Slicehost are a great host – I really have no problems with their hosting, the people or the service. Its all been 100% but Linode offer more for the money and so its time to move away fully. If Slicehost happen to up the anté with new features to match I may considr moving back but for now Linode are mikles ahead. I’ve done a summary of their strengths below.

Why Linode Is Better

• Fine grained control over node – just about everything can be configured to your hearts content.
• Huge choice of kernels AND the choice to use custom kernels too!!
• Swap IPs between nodes.
• IP failover.
• Private IPs between nodes for local communications.
• Usage and stats galore in numbers and pictures.
• Custom alerts for resource usage.
• Really friendly team of people who listen to their customers. For example shortly after my previous review one of the guys at Linode commented on it!!
• Easy and fine grained upgrades of nodes. Add extra RAM, disk, IPs, bandwidth, etc.
• Faster network access. This is very subjective but my SSH connection has been noticeably faster and more responsive on Linode. The same can be said for a friend who made the shift to Linode too.

Why Slicehost Is Better

• Bigger and stronger community with forums, Facebook profiles, comprehensive wiki, etc.
• More comprehensive API.
• Great technical documentation in the form of articles and wiki.
• Company colour is blue – my favourite.
• Very simple (i.e. user-friendly) backup system – though it does cost.

CheapVPS / A2B2 / VAServe

This is a UK company and I’d heard great things about their service at the WHT forums.  Unfortunately it didn’t go well and I’m no longer with them.  Here’s my key gripes:

Poorly designed ‘out of the box’ management systems. These were just confusing.  It took 15 minutes for me to figure out how to bloody find my VPS information.  Eventually I was told it hadn’t been setup (I only had an account control panel) and it would be done that evening.  Cheers for telling me.  What an amazing method of signing customers up.  Give them acocunt access then hold them back form getting the VPS for a few hours.

Nasty hidden terms – this is a classic contract lock in.  I chose to pay 3 months upfront but decided I’d end my contract at the end of 3 months.  Now with hosts I’ve used in the past if you cancel your account its done with.  Thats it – over.  However, CheapVPS require 10 days notice and so my cancelling of the account on the day of renewal was disallowed and I was told to pay the next full 3 months invoice.  Where is this 10 day notice period mentioned?  On their Terms, linked to at the bottom of the site in the centre of a 2000 word document.  The kind of thing no fucker reads!!!

Futurehosting.biz

I used these people for about a month before hopping ship.  Their support is aggressive, confrontational and idiotic.  Their service was no better with shoddy CentOS plans that some of my sites (Rails-based) wouldn’t work on because of the faffing about withgetting various plugins working.  A problem I’ve not had with any other host.