You are reading this post on my newly migrated slicehost xen virtual machine.

This is my first hosting experience: until now my web site was running off of a machine under my desk at home. This is obviously not ideal for bandwidth or reliability. Slicehost caters to a technical demographic that just wants a stripped down OS and little or no management tools. And it’s cheap to start.

Initially I installed mysql, apache2, php and various supporting packages. I loaded databases for WordPress and Gallery2 and rsynced my data over. With a little tweaking everything was up and running.

As you may know Gallery2 generates thumbnails on the fly as users visit the site. I cleared the thumbnails during some troubleshooting so they had to all be regenerated on my slicehost. What I found was that on the 256mb slice the system spent an inordinate amount of time in iowait and in many cases Gallery pages would timeout. It took noticeably longer than the Pentium III 350mhz I just migrated from.

After added swap files without improvement I finally upgraded to a 512mb slice. Result: it screams. Ultimately the 256mb slice is just not enough to contain the OS and an application of any significant size.

My intial thoughts were that slicehost was a disaster and I should run but really their baseline packages is just *really* lean on memory. If you’re having problems you might want to try upgrading before any further troubleshooting: they bill pro-rated and will allow you to fall back at no charge if you don’t like the updated slice.