It’s been 11 days since I’ve had a slicehost account, so I figured I would write about my experience with it.  Slicehost is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) host that pretty much gives you webspace, an internet connection, and lets you do whatever you want with it.  It’s nice to have the control…but that also means you need to configure it all yourself.  I was nervous making the switch because it would mean more responsibility and more liability.  It’s taken a lot of time to configure my slice (almost a week), but I think it was worth it.

Since I’m not extremely experienced with Linux, it took me a while to find my way around.  You start off with a flavor of Linux installed on your slice (you can choose from Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and others).  Then you log in and need to secure your server and add the functionality you need.  I followed the tutorials at http://articles.slicehost.com and they were crystal clear.  They were the best tutorials I’ve ever seen.  I got up and running pretty fast.  The problem was customizing certain parts of my server to optimize for my site.  I also ran into some problems when I didn’t do things right.

Whenever I ran into problems, I would just go to http://chat.slicehost.com where there was always somebody there to help.  It’s some of the best tech support I’ve ever gotten.  I’d tell them my problem, then they’d usually ask me to check certain error logs, then they’d tell me what was wrong and how to solve it.  So far I’ve probably taken 20 problems there and they solved 100% of them.  That’s what I love the most about slicehost.

I still use HostGator–some of my websites can’t be transferred yet (too much hassle).  I just had an issue today with my email that I needed to talk to their support about.  I think my experience today was typical of how it’s been the past two years there.  I used their liveperson chat client.  Here’s the conversation(with boring content removed):

[hostgator]: Welcome to HostGator Live Chat, how may I assist you?

Jon: I have an email where all of the emails bounce[problem description]. here is the error:[error]

[hostgator]: Check to see if the mailbox is full.

Jon: it’s not

[hostgator]: That is an odd error. What email can I send a test to?

Jon: [email]

[hostgator]: Sent

Jon: I got your test email

[hostgator]: There has to be something wrong on the Google aps email that cant send out. On the Google aps account try repling back to me.

Jon: sent

[hostgator]: I got it. I am stumped on this. It is like that google aps account just cant send to that one account.

[hostgator]: I would suggest emailing support@hostgator.com to see if the admins can look into the email records and figure out the problem.

Jon: ok

[hostgator]: Sorry I could not help you.

[hostgator]: It confused me and I do not have access to the records.

[hostgator]: Is there anything else I can help you with?

Jon: no thats all

[hostgator]: Excellent, take care and have a great day!

[hostgator]: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat! If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says “close” in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

This support conversation was actually one of the pleasantest ones that I’ve had–others have been really bad.  Here are the things that pretty much happens every time I talk to support:

1. First off, they blame it on somebody else.  Here they blamed it on Google.  In about 60% of my calls, they blame it on me and tell me that it might go away later.

2. They don’t really understand what your problem is.  They usually always give me a “solution” that’s unrelated, which tells me that they’re telling you to do stuff before they really understand what’s going on.

3. They tell you “I can’t help you.  I don’t have access to that.  You’ll need to email support@hostgator.com”

Yea, I would always like to email support@hostgator.com first to get the support guys that actually have permissions to fix my problem.  But the problem with that is that it takes them way too long to answer them.  One time I had a huge server problem and I emailed them.  Our email conversation went through this process: [hostgator]it’s not our fault, [me]yea it is, look at the logs, [hostgator]okay I changed xxx, [me]no it still doesn’t work, [hostgator]oh, I’ll change this [me]no, it still doesn’t work, [hostgator] it’s not our fault.  That particular issue took 4 days to resolve.  Email support would respond about 5-30 hours later.  Meanwhile, I had customers calling me every hour or so.

Which is why I believe that slicehost will work a lot nicer.  I wrote this article mostly to provide the advice I wish that I had, not to get referral points or whatnot.  But if you do sign up for slicehost, I’d be appreciative if you use me as the referral by clicking this link–it won’t increase your price at all.