Slash Hosting
Slash is weblog software. A weblog is a community site that periodically has new content, which can be submitted by users or the system administrator. Content is arranged by topic, and each story has a discussion attached to it.
Key features of Slash:
- It is relatively mature, at version 2.2.
- It has a moderation system where qualified users can moderate other users' posts. People that want to read only the best of the comments can set their threshhold to a higher number.
- It has an extensible plugin system.
- It has a great search feature, where a user can search the site's stories, comments, or users by keyword.
But don't just let me sit here and explain it. Take a look! Here are the Slashcode sites hosted here at Yoder Internet Development:
- TravTalk.org
The following are customer sites and do not necessarily represent the views of Yoder Internet Development: - JesusGeeks.net
- nerock.com (rock climbing, NE USA)
- StopWorldWar3.com
- MarkupWorld.com
- LinuxTampa.com
- ConnTrails.org
Also worth checking out is the official Slashcode.com site.
Slash is really best for sites with at least hundreds of users. If you're looking for a small club or family forum, there are probably better options out there.
Why should you host your Slash site here?
Slash is complex software. It has a rather steep list of hardware and software requirements. On the software side, it needs mod_perl compiled into Apache. Mod_perl is a memory hog, so that increases the hardware requirements. For these reasons, you cannot host Slash sites on normal Web hosting accounts. Micah Yoder Internet Development has a beefy server that should be able to handle a lot of Slash sites with no trouble. And when it does start slowing down I'll gladly add another one!
Bandwidth. M.Y.I.D.'s server is located in a building that spends millions of dollars a month for Internet connectivity. It has great routes to nearly everywhere.
Our server also uses the amazing mod_gzip Apache module that compresses most HTML pages by literally as much as 90%! Slash's main HTML front page is usually around 50K. With mod_gzip, it is between 5 and 6K! It does not apply to images (they are already compressed), POST operations (there seems to be a bug with that and mod_perl, but POSTs have a fairly small percentage of total requests), and some extremely old browsers that cannot accept gzip'd content. Even with those limitations, your bandwidth usage should be easily 60% less here. A great way to check a prospective hosting provider is to go to Netcraft and enter the name of the server where your site would be hosted. If the displayed Web server information does not include mod_gzip, then you would be wasting most of your bandwidth at that location!
Want banner ads on your site? Our server also uses mod_adbanners. Mod_adbanners is an ad rotation system that lets you manage your own ads instead of giving a significant portion of the revenue to an ad banner company (which ironically is both easier for end-users to block and can make your site stall or hang if their server is not responding, which occasionally happens). You can activate that on your account for an additional fee. But if you have a popular site, think of the profit potential. If on average your page size with images (including the ad) is 50K (and with mod_gzip, it should be a lot less unless you use a lot of big images) and you can get half a cent per ad impression (you should be able to get more), you're making $100 per gigabyte of bandwidth.
Included Utilities: We provide a way for you to modify your database with phpMyAdmin. It is a web-based graphical MySQL tool. We also have a way for you to restart Apache which is sometimes useful when you change your site.
What are Customers Saying?
... your hosting services and customer response have been excellent. The launch of NERock.com was a lot of work, but went smoothly thanks to your help. Using your hosting services was a good decision.
- Jason Huckaby, Nerock.com
I still drool every time I cat /proc/cpuinfo
- Greg Day, JesusGeeks.net, about the server
Rates
Most hosting companies charge you $X for Y gigabytes of transfer per month. If you go over that, they start charging you significantly more per gigabyte, and if you use less, you're paying for bandwidth you're not using. That's not the case here! We charge per gigabyte of transfer, with a modest monthly minimum charge to cover the hardware requirements that every Slash site has.
In addition, we have no arbitrary limits on disk space usage. When I was looking at hosting my Slash site elsewhere, before deciding to get my own server, I was amazed that almost everyone gave you a few hundred megabytes of disk space and charged you $1 to $5 per additional megabyte per month. I wonder if they failed to notice that even nice fast SCSI hard drives cost less than a cent per megabyte to buy these days ... (of course, if you're using a lot more disk space than is proportional to your bandwidth, we might need to talk...)
| Setup | $55 |
|---|---|
| Flat cost per gigabyte of transfer | $12.50 |
| Setup of mod_adbanners | $50 |
| Cost per gigabyte of transfer with mod_adbanners | $15 |
| POP Mail Accounts or forwarding | $4 each/month |
| Absolute minimum monthly charge | $20 |
| Custom modification of the Slash front-end programs or other administration above basic install support | $45/hr |
| Credit for referring another Slash hosting customer | $20 (towards your bandwidth) |
Note that bandwidth will be calculated by Webalizer, and we'll add 15% for incoming traffic and other misc. things that are not included in Web summaries.
The minimum monthly amount covers bandwidth and mail. Bandwidth can be charged in fractions of a gigabyte.
Contact Info
If you have questions or would like to order, please e-mail micah@yoderdev.com