Slicehost Accounts Converting to Rackspace Cloud Server Accounts Over Next Year | Hacker News Reader

Slicehost Accounts Converting to Rackspace Cloud Server Accounts Over Next Year

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17 pointstdupree6 comments

Not mine. Sorry, just closed my account and moved to the AWS free tier for the next year. I love the SliceHost model, but they just aren't playing the game anymore. Linode provides 512mb of RAM for the same price as the 256mb SliceHost offering. So why didn't I jump over to Linode? Honestly, because I'm lazy and I like learning new things.

Start to finish, I had my new EC2 Micro Instance up, running, with ZNC (w/ colloquy) installed in under a half hour. Not only was it freaking fast (~613mb RAM helps), but its free for a year. I took a snapshot of the install just in case, and now its golden. Firewalls, SSH keys, and package repos just worked.

shrugs Thankfully my only VPS is for play time, so I can move it around all I want, destroy, and rebuild it.

Is there a particular tutorial you recommend? It's been a while, but last time I tried EC2 I found it hard to get things going.

Honestly, I didn't use one. I thought I was going to need a book or two to get started, but all I did was sign up for EC2, launch a Micro Instance with the Amazon Linux 32bit Image (eligible for the free tier), downloaded the keys, and ssh'd in. The only hitch I ran into was you have to log in as ec2-user, not root, with the keypair. After that, it was smooth sailing. Micro instances uses EBS for boot and local storage, so I think they persist after termination. Anyone is free to chime in and correct me, but I think the larger instances have 'local storage' that is purged on reboot in addition to EBS.

My only advice would be to fire one up, and try it out. Either its gotten a lot easier, or I've gotten a lot smarter. The former is far more likely. :)

You are correct in that local storage is wiped when instances terminate. Micro instances don't have local instance storage, only EBS. :)

There's a discussion going on at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510300

I've been using the rackspace cloud servers for almost two years and aside from their slow control panel (please someone give them a ui/ux person) it's a great service that is very simple to use and has been incredibly reliable.

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