The status notes go out on all three.
Shared accounts on CentOS 5.2. Virtual servers with root on them, CentOS or Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS, which is new here this year. Both come off machines in a building somebody here can walk into.
Three panels is two more than anybody needs. We run all three because accounts arrive already knowing one of them, and a fortnight spent learning ours is a fortnight nobody is getting back.
Shell access is no longer offered on shared plans. It is included here, where the consequences stay inside your own machine.
The floor's electricity is matched with renewable certificates for the whole of 2008, and the machines swapped out in March draw about a third of what they replaced. The certificate is real. The leaf is a drawing.
Two feeds, generators tested on a Sunday, and a fuel contract somebody here has read to the end. Every host in this trade has had a paragraph like this one since the last week of May. Ours is older than the news.
Dedicated machines, a second rack for the copies, and named people on the account. SOAP and WSDL endpoints remain published for the enterprise pilot, which is now in its third year of being described to us as imminent.
Passenger replaced the Mongrel pools in the spring and removed an entire category of message from the mailbox.
Pick one opcode cache. Running two is a support ticket with your name already written on it.
Console is still here. It is the oldest software in production at this company and the only piece nobody has volunteered to replace.
| SlopHost | Slicehost | GoGrid | AOL Hometown | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Root on a virtual server | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Billed by the hour | No. Monthly | No. Monthly | Yes | It was free |
| Somebody there can say which physical machine you are on | Yes, without looking it up | Not stated | Not stated | No |
| Answers to a parent company | No | Yes, since October | Yes | Yes |
| Taking new accounts in December | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Compiled from published material on 8 December. AOL Hometown closed on 31 October and is left in because it was a competitor for ten months of the year. Slicehost was bought in the same fortnight and remains the straight answer for anybody who wants a slice, an API and nobody in particular.
Year 2000. Section 508. Sarbanes-Oxley. CAN-SPAM. PCI DSS 1.2, published in October and adopted here the same month. The list is append-only. That was a decision made once and never revisited.
We will run your DNS beside your old host's until you are satisfied, and copy the database twice: once to rehearse and once for real. A format war ended in a single news cycle in February. Most of the transfers we watched this year took longer than that.
The week before the Y Combinator deadline is reliably our busiest week for new Rails installs. We have stopped calling it a coincidence.
Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer 7 and 6, Safari 3.2, Opera 9.6, Chrome, and on the nine-inch laptop everybody's aunt bought this year, which runs an operating system she has never heard of and cannot name.
XHTML 1.0 Strict on a 960 pixel grid, and it validates. The redesigns going up this autumn use a doctype four words long. We will get to it.
Corners are rounded for Gecko and WebKit. Internet Explorer squares them off and the page is not a corner short of working.
Copyright 1996–2008 SlopHost. Our 2007 page is still on this server, unedited, and the specification printed on it is still being met. So is the first one. Version numbers are what was installed on the morning of 8 December. Where software is described as on request, the request is a sentence in an ordinary message and the installation is done by a person that day or the next. Apache, MySQL, Ubuntu, cPanel, Plesk and DirectAdmin belong to their respective owners, none of whom are us.