i.justrealized

My web host, Slicehost, has been acquired by Rackspace.

Big news - Rackspace and Slicehost

What an amazing day for Slicehost and our customers! Our acquistion by Rackspace has been announced and we couldn’t be more excited. Jason and I started Slicehost two years ago and it grew beyond our wildest dreams.

We believe that Slicehost and Rackspace are fantastic complements to each other. Our technology strengthens their position in the cloud hosting world. Their expertise, experience and resources enable us to improve our product and continue meeting our customers’ needs. Fear not loyal Slicehosters, we promise to keep doing what we’ve always done – listening to you and building a product that solves your problems. (Source: Slicehost)

Who is Rackspace Hosting?

Rackspace, now 10 years old, is one of the most respected companies in our industry and are now on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RAX) after recently going public. Rackspace delivers computing-as-service, striving to make it reliable and affordable. One of the reasons we like Rackspace is because they think like we do… they value their customers above everything else.

I think it’s good news. I’m happy for Slicehost. Rackspace has been reputable in server offerings. Acquiring Slicehost betters Rackspace’s developer relationship and is inline with their cloud hosting ambitions which would compete directly with mights such as Amazon.

Slicehost will be a subsidiary of Rackspace. At the upcoming Rackspace Cloud Hosting event, Slicehost would be announcing larger slices and a price reduction.

Keep getting this today. Looks like tweaking the MySQL and Apache processes didn’t really work. Things still go down. I had to do a hard reboot today:

Out of Memory: Kill process 4446 (mysqld) score 124676 and children.
Out of memory: Killed process 4446 (mysqld).
Out of Memory: Kill process 4712 (mysqld) score 53658 and children.
Out of memory: Killed process 4712 (mysqld).
Out of Memory: Kill process 4727 (mysqld) score 53658 and children.
Out of memory: Killed process 4727 (mysqld).
Out of Memory: Kill process 4728 (mysqld) score 53658 and children.
Out of memory: Killed process 4728 (mysqld).
Out of Memory: Kill process 4626 (apache2) score 41595 and children.
Out of memory: Killed process 4626 (apache2).
Out of Memory: Kill process 4613 (apache2) score 41570 and children.
Out of memory: Killed process 4613 (apache2).
Out of Memory: Kill process 4742 (mysqld) score 104640 and children.
Out of memory: Killed process 4742 (mysqld).
Out of Memory: Kill process 4812 (mysqld) score 70759 and children.
Out of memory: Killed process 4812 (mysqld).

This 256 MB VPS runs 2.5 blogs and 1 Python.

Well, it’s time to upgrade to 512 MB I guess. I was intending to up the lighttpd server but perhaps it shall stay asleep but another 2 months. I probably am upgrading to 512 MB coming January.

It was a little sluggish yesterday and I had to do a hard reboot ’cause a soft reboot just hung there. I am running on very limited resources. I have only 256 MB of RAM and every little bit counts. I am on Slicehost by the way.

Previously there wasn’t any problems. It was until recently my friend Daryl have his new blog in my VPS and my new little personal project that’s a little database intensive.

I logged into the web console only to find error messages with MySQL processes. They’re out of memory. I hard rebooted it and tweaked MySQL settings to reduce table caching. Honestly I have no idea what I was doing. People said it worked and I just followed.

That sort of fixed the MySQL problems, but this evening my site become inaccessible again. This time, it was Apache. After reducing the number of Apache servers running, things seem to be doing better.

Here’s my Apache settings, it’s reduced to work on 256 MB RAM:

Then the super cache plugin in WordPress started to misbehave. It just refuse to load anything in the cache after I upgrade super cache. I spent an hour on this one. And I learnt something - when in doubt, just reboot.

• Playmobil Security Check Point reviewed - http://tinyurl.com/5ublzh #
• @echoz @pkchukiss Slicehost working fine already! #
• @uzyn: Use wire use wire, LOL #

SingNet doesn’t like Slicehost too much. I’ve been having some troubles connecting to the host. There’s a 20% chance that the request would time out. It’s like 1/5 of SingNet systems aren’t working.

Other Singaporeans like pkchukiss and Jeremy encounter similar problems with we earlier discussed in Slicehost forums. Both of them mentioned they mailed the technical support so I guess I’ll just wait and see.

Basically, there’s some problems with the internet backbone (probably the C6 cervical vertebrae or something). After randomly tracerouting and pinging here and there, it appears SingNet’s machines aren’t properly configured to a SingTel node.

When with Media Temple, this blog takes ages to load, but at least it loads. With Slicehost, this blog loads quickly and that is if it actually loads.

Are there any other Slicehost users in Singapore?

[The problem appears to be resolved.]

• Happy Birthday Singapore! #
• Holy crap, Hotmail Ajax just worked in my Firefox. It used not to the past many months. #
• Meanwhile Microsoft.com looked totally fucked. #
• @echoz Hey, this is kahwee here, using Slicehost too. #
• @limyh You should look at it using Safari too, that’s what I call fucked. It only worked with Internet Explorer now. #
• WordPress 2.7 coming out with plugin uninstall API. I don’t trust developers handling uninstallers, haha #
• @limyh Hmmm, as with WordPress release trends, probably early November? They yet to set a definite date. #
• @uzyn: youcanhasmodafinil! #
• @plaktoz It’s kinda funny and weird at the same time. #

• Reuters reports SingTel to launch 3G iPhone coming August 22. #
• @cerventus I don’t know yet, I hope not a super expensive plan to go along with the already not-too-cheap iPhone. #
• Slicehost-hosted sites tends to request-timeout in Singapore. I wonder if it is Cogent’s fault. #