[Catalyst] Catalyst Hosting

[Danny Warren]

Michele Beltrame wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I have a couple of slices at SliceHost, which seems very good to me (and support
> is just fine!).
> 
> OK, they're Rails coders, but they do well... ;-)
> 
> Michele.

Another vote for SliceHost here, been with them for a while now and more 
satisfied than I have ever been with another hosting company.  I give 
them huge props for writing ALL their own hosting panel apps and keeping 
everything useful and lightweight (even if it is rails, heh).

I tried a handful of VPS providers (but skipped linode for some reason, 
don't recall why) before deciding, and what sold me on SliceHost was:

* Developer-friendly admins (that is a HUGE plus right there)
* The cleanest out-of-the-box VM images of any provider I have dealt 
with so far
* Tons of distros to choose from, and they are proactive about offering 
new / updates ones (they are gunning for a BSD image when the technology 
catches up, which I am excited about)
* They don't oversell their server space (which leads to the only 
downside, having to wait for them to allocate space for you)
* Their homemade panel software is awesome:
   * You can console in to your box via an ajax webapp if something goes 
horribly wrong (!!)
   * They offer a regular rotating backup routine for only $10 extra per 
month
   * Insanely easy to wipe or restore a VPS image if you bork it (no 
support tickets, just click a button)

Don't mean to sound like a shill, but I burned through a handful of bad 
VPS providers while waiting for my slice to be ready and was overjoyed 
when I got to it.  The VM images at some of those places were messier 
than a shared host environment.

For shared hosting, I still like asmallorange.com for the price and the 
support, but stay away from their VPS service (comes pre-loaded with 
cPanel, and don't dare touch the apache config or the whole thing goes 
to hell).

Danny