slophost.com
Web hosting since 1996
WEB HOST OF THE YEAR 2007

The best place to host your startup.

Apache, PHP and MySQL on hardware we own, in a building we can drive to. Rails runs here as well, which is not a sentence every host can write this year.

Accounts opened in the fortnight before a Y Combinator deadline go on the same servers as everything else. There is only the one kind.

Network uptime

100%

guaranteed, measured monthly


The figure is 100% because the guarantee is about what we owe you when it is not, and that document works at either number.

Unlimited disk space. Unlimited bandwidth.* The limits that apply are in the acceptable use policy, which is where limits go now.

Included with every account

cPanel 11 and WHM 11

The x3 theme, and an AJAX file manager that moves a file from one folder to another without reloading the page. We have opened two conference stands with that sentence.

Applications, installed for you

WordPress 2.3, which finally has tags of its own. Drupal 5. Joomla! 1.0.13, with 1.5 in release candidate. phpBB3 arrived in December after six years and goes in from the same menu as the rest.

Carbon neutral

We buy renewable energy certificates covering everything the racks draw. The electricity arriving at the building is the same electricity.

Rails, and the rest of the stack

Ruby 1.8.6 with Rails 2.0, which arrived this month. Applications are served by a cluster of Mongrels behind Apache, and that is a sentence we would like to stop writing as soon as somebody makes it unnecessary.

memcached, APC and eAccelerator are available on the virtual and dedicated plans. SOAP and WSDL endpoints are published for our enterprise pilot, so we are fully SOA-ready if that is a thing you need to tell someone.

Deploys go out with Capistrano over SSH, from Subversion. Git is installed on request, and the requests began in about March.

On the server

WebApache 2.2.6
LanguagesPHP 5.2.5, Perl 5.8.8, Python 2.5
DatabaseMySQL 5.0.45
Ruby1.8.6, Rails 2.0, Mongrel
PanelscPanel 11, WHM 11, Plesk 8.6, DirectAdmin
SystemsCentOS 5, FreeBSD 6.2, Debian 4 Etch
VirtualVirtuozzo 4.0, Xen 3.1, OpenVZ
WindowsASP.NET 3.5, IIS 6, ColdFusion 8
CertificatesEV SSL, green address bar in IE7

PHP 4 reaches end of life on 31 December. Accounts still running it have been written to twice and will be written to again.

How we compare

We are asked how we sit against The Planet, ServerBeach and Layered Technologies. All three are larger than we are, and all four of us buy the same machines from the same two vendors, so the comparison that decides it is who reads your ticket on a Sunday. If you want Rails and nothing else, Engine Yard does Rails and nothing else, and we would tell you that in person.

The building has two power feeds and a generator that is tested on the first Monday of the month, which is noticeable only to the people standing next to it.