Web 2.0 Hosting From Slamdot

The slogan is clear and bold, web hosting that’s easy to manage. Slamdot is a new web hosting provider that I’ve had the pleasure of taking a sneak peek into.

Wrapped in dark blue with a splash of green, Slamdot aims to take the pain out of web hosting for you. All your account functions are available from a central dashboard which is really easy to get used to. What impressed me was that the information which is most important to each relevant section of the account is displayed in the right sidebar, making navigating quicker than usual.

Some of the special features that Slamdot has are -

• completely integrated billing, support, hosting, and domain management
• ability to manage multiple hosting plans (great for web design clients)
• built-in FastCGI control so you can restart Rails applications

The hosting provider’s state of the art servers are located in the SoftLayer datacenter near Dallas, TX. The RAID servers come with at least 2GB of RAM and all data is backed up nightly. See here for a full set of hosting features and signing up for their web hosting service.

Right, now let’s have a look inside. You dashboard is where you can do all of your billing and account-related management, clicking through to the main plan management you see a tabbed interface which is very…well 2.0 if you will. Each tab has their own respective sub categories to further manage your hosting plan.

The hosting control panel shows you the amount of bandwidth and disk space you have used and how much you have left, handy information to always know for customers. You can jump to the most important areas straight away from the welcome page, which can save you a lot of time if you have many domains to manage or work as a hosting manager.

My one main gripe that I’ve always had with my current host is the absolutely retarded way of collecting stats. Instead of showing me unique visitors, they show me the number of server requests each of my visitors has made. Which in effect makes for totally useless stats. Slamdot though does things differently.

The first thing you see when you click on “Website” are your web stats and you are greeted by an Alexa chart for your domain, along with a month by month comparison, followed by a daily visit log of unique and total visitors. It also shows the amount of data transferred. You can see more detailed stats by clicking on the “Webalizer Stats” button. More help is only a search away.

Each hosting plan offers you a bunch of features, at $11 a month the Personal plan gives you the option to host up to 3 websites, MySQL databases, domain pointers, subdomains, email accounts, FTP accounts and more. Which if I look at it comes out around a $1 cheaper than where I currently host. But I have to say the ease of use makes the price I pay seem much much higher. Though personally I wouldn’t host 2 websites on one plan itself, let alone 3.

Uploading files via Slamdot’s file manager is very easy, you simply click on the directory you want to upload to and browse for your file to upload and do it, that’s it.

Advanced Features

Going into the advanced features, you see a bunch of options, again the ease of use in navigation was just very pleasing. From manging your databases, backups, Perl Modules, FastCGI and Cron Jobs. Setting up an SSL will need you to get a dedicated IP, which costs an extra $1 month.

Managing your email with all the options available will probably keep not just us boys, but the girls happy too. From setting auto responders, vacation messages, setting filters to block out spam, further spam settings and more. Overall a well rounded offering for a web host.

Domain registrations are also possible with the price being $10 a year for new registrations or transfers.

They also maintain a company hosting blog and have a forum where customers can post about issues or just read up, though nobody has done that yet as they are fresh of the tubes.

I also got the chance to ask a few questions to the founder Sean Christman,

Do you own your own server equipment?

We do not own our own server equipment. We lease servers from the SoftLayer datacenter in the famous Infomart telecom hotel. SoftLayer’s virtual datacenter tools give us just as much control as we would have if we had our own datacenter, except without all the added costs and aging equipment. We use real-deal, rack-mounted RAID servers from Supermicro. We don’t skimp on the hardware we lease from SoftLayer.

What are the main goals of your hosting service?

Our two main goals are to greatly improve the usability of hosting account management in order to bring it up to speed with the latest web trends, and to host our customers on top-grade hardware that’s reliable and performs well. We’re not competing in the “budget hosting” space as we feel that our customers will be willing to pay a reasonable price for the passion and craftsmanship that we put into our hosting service.

Everybody Go To…Slamdot for hosting.

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