Slicehost vs Brightbox

I’ve recenlty been checking out Slicehost: http://www.slicehost.com
Can anyone give me some good reasons why I should use Brightbox instead? Slicehost seems a lot better value, even if you take into account Brightbox’s Mysql cluster.

I think that the two services cater to different needs. Slicehost is not tailored toward Rails deployments, although my understanding is that they do host quite a few of them. Because of this, you don’t get a Rails stack installed by default, access to FiveRuns or the ease of the brightbox gems, which are a very welcome addition to the headaches of a typical medium/large-scale Rails deployment. With Slicehost, you also don’t get the MySQL cluster (as you mentioned) or a network mount, which can come in handy for sharing files between multiple brightboxes. (Although admittedly you could setup the network mount yourself on Slicehost with a little work.)

That being said, I think Slicehost has some really nice advantages over Brightbox. Their online slice management is superb, allowing creating/upgrading/backing up/restoring slices and more online. They also have an API that will let you programatically do many of those things through ActiveResource (Ruby or Python). You also get your choice of distro (but you should choose Ubuntu anyway!). The Slicehost community is also very good. Their articles, wiki, forums, and chatrooms provide a lot of information to help you manage your slice.

Disclaimer: Personally, I am a Slicehost customer. I have had nothing but good experiences with them. Their support is first-class and they have always been friendly and helpful. My company hosts several large Rails sites with Brightbox, probably amounting to several dozen slices. I can’t speak to the helpfulness of Brightbox’s support, as I am not the one who normally interfaces with them.

The opinions expressed above are my own and do not represent those of my company. :)

@dstrelau – my bad on the textile. It’s fixed now.

Thanks for your input, dstrelau. I’m already a Brightbox customer – we can’t really fault them on reliability or customer service. We were just looking for other providers to avoid having all our eggs in one basket, and also to see if there are any better deals out there.

For me, the fact that Brightbox are rails-specific isn’t a massive benefit although I must admit that the deployment recipes are useful. I managed to get a test-deployment of our application up and running on Slicehost about half a day after signing up.

It’s also worth considering the UK/US aspect (I have customers in both countries). It’s good to be able to speak to people in the same timezone and scheduled overnight maintenance can hit you in the middle of the morning with a US host. I’m not a customer of either Slicehost or Brightbox yet, but I’m about to be.

@Ric: I too like the idea of more than one basket for my eggs.

@Brightbox: I like the forum. Nice work.

@David Smalley: what did you do to fix the textile parsing? – we’ve got the same problem on our beast forum. :-)

@Ric:

He just installed the RedCloth gem I believe.

@Caius Thanks. I already have Redcloth installed but I figured it out – different versions of RedCloth behave differently in that respect. :-)

This is a good person to speak at the same time zone and overnight maintenance program can play in the middle of the Gadgets morning, your host with the United States.