Midnight Oil

Before we switched to Slicehost, we had our VPS on Rimuhosting. I must say that I was very pleased with Rimuhosting’s service, and we never had any problems with stability. We eventually had to switch to Slicehost anyway because it was simply cheaper and we’re on razor-thin margins here.

Still, switching hosts is not a trivial process, and you have to factor in the switching effort when deciding if the price differential is worth it. If you’ve found a cheaper host and are thinking about jumping ship, the very first thing you should do is contact your current provider and see if they’ll match the new host’s price. That’s what we did initially with Rimuhosting. They didn’t match the deal, but they did give us a little more RAM for free. That tided us over for another month or two before we decided we wanted to give Slicehost a shot.

So, for posterity, and to help other bargain hunters, here is the letter I sent, and Rimuhosting’s response.

I’ve been a Rimuhosting customer for several months now. In general I am happy with the service, although my server seems to be getting more and more sluggish in recent weeks.

Due to the performance issues, I began shopping around for alternatives and I came across Slicehost ( http://www.slicehost.com/ ). Since they’re a competitor, I’m sure you’re already familiar with them.

According to their price list, they will give me 256MB RAM plus more disk space for $20/mo, compared to the 160MB of RAM I’m getting for $29. For me, the RAM is the big deal, and the extra storage is just icing on the cake.

I am seriously considering moving to slicehost, as I am finding that the 160MB I currently have is eaten quickly by Tomcat, mongrel, and MySQL. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, I have been seeing some very serious performance issues lately, with slowdowns on ssh as well as terrible response times from the web server. This could be due to not enough memory on my VPS, but I’m concerned it has to do with too few CPU cycles being devoted to the VPS.

In all honesty, I would rather not switch hosting companies, as I have been pleased with the level of service from Rimuhosting. In addition, moving a VPS installation is no small task and I do not relish the idea of trying to replicate all my settings on a new machine. Still, Slicehost’s pricing plan is very attractive.

Before I make any decisions, I would like to ask what sort of plan you would be willing to offer in order to compete with Slicehost. If you could offer a combination of more RAM and a lower price, it would go a long way towards tipping the scales in Rimuhosting’s favor.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.

Micah Wedemeyer
http://www.aisleten.com

Their response to me:

Hi Micah,

I’ve added some additional memory to your VPS:

[root@obsidianportal ~]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           300        148        151          0         16         55
-/+ buffers/cache:         76        223
Swap:           95          0         95

Also moved your current pricing from 39.95, to where our current MiroVPS2 plans are, at 29.95 a month.

We feel that we offer a good value for the service we provide. We appreciate your business and hope you will stay with us.