Developer In London wrote:
I use Mosso instead of slicehost. With a bit of sysadmin skills you
should
be able to get your rails app up and running very quickly.
Good to know. Mosso looks interesting, but I’ve never tried it. FWIW,
I love Slicehost; never used Rimuhosting.
I was also with slicehost. I had both slicehost and mosso at the same time and the servers run on the same datacentre with same subnets and even same default names. I cant speak for the whole Mosso company but from my experience they are EXACTLY same as slicehost. Most likely they inherited slicehost’s infrastructure when they bought them.
[…]
They own slicehost so you dont get anything
different, just a slightly cheaper price.
Not quite true. Certainly Mosso and Slicehost are now both owned by
Rackspace, but my understanding is that Mosso is cloud-based whereas
Slicehost is a VPS service. Quite different.
I saw both of them to be Xen virtual servers. Mosso has a different product ‘Cloud Sites’ which runs from full cloud. Yes they are different, but you cant compare an apple with a banana. Mosso’s Virtual servers have zero difference with slicehost.
I am yet to find any hosting
company that provides a good reliable support, so you can forget support
on
whoever you go with. Reality is you are on your own and have the forums
to
help you.
Again, no. I have used Rackspace on (non-Rails) projects for clients
and been extremely impressed by their level of support – quick,
comprehensive and capable. Slicehost had a reputation for great support
even before Rackspace bought them, so while I’ve never had to deal with
their support staff, I would expect their support to be excellent as
well.
Again, yes. I have used rackspace myself, their ‘fanatical support’ is only covered if you sign up for the managed service. But then you cant get it on VPS, you have to get a full dedicated server, and then yes they will set things up for you if needed. From the mosso version of support, you get as much help as they can provide through chat or phone, but they will not login to your server to investigate anything. Neither will slicehost. I speak all of this from my own personal experience. Their knowledge of SysAdmin is somewhat limited, I spent hours chatting to them on the phone or chat to troubleshoot a problem only in the end they would give up and leave it to me to sort it out on my own. This has happened on numerous occassions. So I am sorry I DO NOT BELIEVE there is good support from ANY hosting company for VPS. I can do better support then them myself being a programmer.
You’re not really on your own with support if you have a good host –
they won’t do everything for you, but they can be very helpful.
Slicehost/Rackspace is definitely a good host.
You ARE on your own if they cannot solve your problems by asking you to try a few standard things they have. If a problem is critical and they cant solve it they will leave you in blue water. I had to spend days learning about sysadmin to get myself upto speed to sort out my issues.
Only way you can get around this is if you get a fully managed dedicated server from rackspace with fanatical support, but usually they start from around 50 times the price of a VPS.
As a host all of rackspace, slicehost and mosso are good. But as I mentioned I dont see the point in spending $20/month for a 256mb slice with 100gb bandwidth when most people would only use a few gigs of bandwidth. With mosso’s same exact package running from the same exact location same spec would come to around $14 or less. My maths arent that rusty yet to work out whats the better deal here. 
I moved my server to mosso instead of upgrading on slicehost.
Hope this helps.
Nayeem
