04 Mar 2009 - Warsaw
Disclaimer: this post has march date, because that was the time I made a decision to move from Slicehost VPS to a dedicated server. But I’ve finally decided only recently (mid-june), with a decision switch from Kimsufi to OVH.pl as my new hosting provider. At the time of writing this disclaimer all my services are already moved to the new host. Slicehost is still ubercool though.
Dear Slicehost,
I’ve been your client for almost a year now. Throughout these 12 months you’ve provided me with great hosting service (actually best I’ve known up to date), with great documentation and tutorials, helpful and smart support and - what’s the most important - steady and reliable hosting I’ve put a few websites on. I’ve been recommending you to friends and companies, so I hope your being great to me turned out to be profitable (at least two of them bought a slice after my recommendation).
You’ve been rock-stable and thanks to that users of all my sites — be it clients of bitspudlo.com store, fellow hobbyists from Border Princes forum or fellow rubyists visiting Warsaw Ruby Users Group site — were always delivered. That worked for my business (bitspudlo.com) and personal reputation (other sites), so you probably understand my warm feelings.
But times change, people change and sites — it’s userbases especially — grow and a small VPS costing 38 bucks a month simply turns out to be not enough, performance-wise. I know I can upgrade to a bigger slice, but that doubles the cost on every step and it’s not something I’m ready to dwell into, especially with recent madness on the currency market when it comes to exchange rate of polish zloty and US dollar. There’s also the matter of transfer limit and disk quota, both pretty low and sometimes even forcing me to pay extra for my sites, and while you tried your best, ping times across half of the globe (Poland, i.e. middle of Europe) cannot go below certain threshold.
So I’m moving on. You’ve been a great hosting, but I’ve got an option of buying a dedicated server from reliable and reputable company (not AS reputable like you, Slicehost, but close), with machines placed physically in Europe (ping times!) and with all the parameters one could expect from a dedicated, for not much more than 38$/month you cost me.
I’ll keep on recommending you to others needing a small and reliable VPS though (especially fellow Rails developers looking for a good hosting for their first Rails/Merb/Sinatra/whatevere project). Goodbye. It’s been a great time. Good luck, you deserve it.