Today I received an email from slicehost that my slice was ready. I've installed a new environment there, and since I have a lot of extra power compared to my old hosting company I installed Plone in place of Apache Forrest which I had been using for a few years previously. I think Forrest did the job well when I had a cheap host and needed a static website, but it seems there wasn't a lot of development recently and definitely not in the looks area - Forrest is pretty ugly.

I've been using python for a few years now, professionally and at home, so I thought about using Zope for my website. After looking at it I realised I'd have to dedicate a lot of time before I'd have something ready to use, so I scrapped that idea and decided to drop in a servlet container and build something light, or roll out some pre-built CMS system. When looking at a list of CMS systems I came across Plone and saw it was built on top of Zope. This caught my eye because I saw I could have something I could use instantly, but also learn Zope and extend it as I needed. I installed it on my linux box at home to try it out and I found it fairly easy to use, so I chose it for my website.

There was no way I'd be able to use this on my old host because it's pretty greedy with memory, Plone/Zope probably uses around the same amount as a Java servlet container. As it happens I was already looking for a new host to set up my own anti-spam system because lately I've been inundated with so many spam messages, I just hadn't found a host I was happy with yet. Around this time I came across slicehost, which looked like a fairly good deal, and I decided wanted what they were offering.

So far the only negative thing I have to say about them is the lack of DNS hosting, however you can always use a service like everydns.net, but this is not ideal. I can understand why they don't do this, their core business is hosting in one place and to be a good DNS host you need to distribute the nameservers well enough to survive failure of 1 or 2 of them. It's a shame they couldn't make some sort of partnership with one of the existing providers though.