slophost.com slophost.com

the best place to host you.

Apache 2.2, PHP 5 and MySQL 5 on hardware we own, in a building with our name on the door. An account answers on your own domain the same afternoon.

The programme that funds companies in batches spends its winters in California now and its summers in Cambridge. It asks applicants for something working and somewhere to see it. We are the somewhere.

control panel cPanel 11 File Manager Fantastico phpMyAdmin AWStats Cron Disk space used Bandwidth this month MySQL 5.0 databases 4 Subdomains unlimited beta MySQL 5.0 databases 4 Subdomains unlimited

cPanel 11, which is in beta and says so in orange.

Network normal on all machines. The last thing that was not normal was a generator test on the first Monday of the month, which is on the calendar and is noticeable only to the people standing next to it.

The control panel

cPanel 10.9 with WHM on every shared machine, and cPanel 11 on any account that asks for it. Eleven moves things. We will move them back for you once, and then we will stop.

Applications, installed for you

WordPress 2.0.5, Drupal 4.7, Joomla! 1.0.11, MediaWiki 1.8 and phpBB 2.0.21, from one menu into a folder you choose. The version of phpBB after this one has been six months away for three years.

Traffic that arrives all at once

Shared accounts burst rather than stop. What takes an account down overnight is no longer arriving from the site with the green logo. It is arriving from the one with the shovel, and it arrives faster.

On the servers

Web serverApache 2.2.3
PHP4.4.4 standard, 5.1.6 on request, 5.2.0 on servers built since November
DatabaseMySQL 5.0.27
Stored proceduresYes
TriggersYes
ViewsYes
LanguagesPerl 5.8.8, Python 2.5
Ruby1.8.5, Rails 1.1.6, and the 1.2 release candidate on request
PanelscPanel 10.9 with WHM, Plesk 8.1, DirectAdmin 1.28
SystemsCentOS 4.4, FreeBSD 6.1
VirtualisationVirtuozzo 3.0, Xen 3.0.3, OpenVZ
WindowsWindows Server 2003 R2, IIS 6, ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005

and the rest of it

Stored procedures, triggers and views are three rows and not one row. They took three years and one row would not show that.

Rails, and how it is served

Ruby 1.8.5 with Rails 1.1.6. An application is served either by FastCGI, which is old and behaves like it, or by a cluster of Mongrels behind Apache, which is new and behaves like it. Deploys go out with Capistrano over SSH from Subversion.

The account API answers XML-RPC and there is a WSDL for the people who need a WSDL, so the panel can be part of somebody else’s mashup if that is a thing you have been asked for.

Control panels we will install

PanelVersionWhere it runs
cPanel with WHM10.9Every shared and reseller machine
cPanel11 betaOn request, on a machine of its own
Plesk8.1Linux and Windows
DirectAdmin1.28On request
H-Sphere2.4Reseller clusters
Ensim Pro10On request. The request is rare.

How we compare

We are asked how we sit against Web.com, which sells a great deal besides hosting, and against Mosso, which started this year and describes itself as a hosting cloud. We have written that phrase down and we are keeping an eye on it.

Everything here runs on machines with our own asset tags on them. The comparison that settles it is who is awake at four in the morning, and that is not a number anybody publishes.

Included

  • Unlimited disk and bandwidth*
  • MySQL 5.0 databases
  • Cron jobs and shell on request
  • AWStats and Webalizer
  • Nightly backups, kept fourteen days
  • FastCGI and Mongrel
  • Unlimited subdomains
  • Announcements, as a feed

Tags

ajax apache awstats bandwidth cgi-bin cpanel cron dns exim fastcgi imap mod_rewrite mongrel mysql openvz perl php4 php5 plesk python rails ruby spamassassin ssh ssl subversion tags webalizer xen

Built from what people search the knowledge base for. It is in alphabetical order, which is a decision we have had to defend twice.

Hosting

  • Shared hosting
  • Reseller
  • Virtual servers
  • Dedicated servers
  • Domain names

On the servers

  • Apache 2.2.3
  • PHP 5.2.0
  • MySQL 5.0.27
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Python 2.5

Panels

  • cPanel 10.9
  • cPanel 11 beta
  • Plesk 8.1
  • DirectAdmin 1.28
  • H-Sphere 2.4

Windows

  • Server 2003 R2
  • ASP.NET 2.0
  • SQL Server 2005
  • IIS 6
  • ColdFusion MX 7

The company

* Unlimited is subject to normal website operation (AUP §4), which defines normal website operation as operation that is normal.

This page is XHTML 1.0 Strict. Last year’s was Transitional. Nothing on it required the change and we made the change anyway. Everything we serve is declared utf-8 now, including the pages written before anybody was declaring anything.

In May two men began standing on a white background and introducing themselves to one another. By June this industry had a version of it and so did we. It ran twice in a trade magazine and then somebody sensible stopped it.

A news agency opened a bureau inside a virtual world this autumn, and two of the brands we host have bought islands in the same place. We have been asked whether we could look after one. We host files, and an island is not a file.

Tested in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2, Safari 2 and Opera 9.

© 1996–2006 slophost.com. This front page is redrawn about once a year and the earlier ones are still up: take another year.