Webslice

Webslice was founded in 2004 in Auckland and has belonged to SiteTech Group, the company behind SiteHost, since an acquisition announced in 2017. It sells two platforms. Webslice Containers rents a Linux virtual machine in a chosen location at a fixed monthly price, patched by Webslice, onto which the customer provisions containers from prebuilt images: Apache or Nginx with PHP, plus Python, Node.js, .NET and Ruby stacks, with MariaDB or MySQL integrated into the console and MongoDB or SQL Server as service images run from the shell. Code arrives over SSH, SFTP or a git clone the customer runs inside the container. An SSH session is a temporary container with the application container mounted into it, and nothing outside the home directory persists.

Webslice Serverless is a PHP platform built on AWS, with a region picked per site. Each site costs a flat monthly fee plus metered requests, runtime, storage and bandwidth, scales to zero, and deploys from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, from a zip dropped into the console, or over SFTP. MySQL is the one database engine, priced per database plus usage. A CDN the company built itself after Stackpath shut down its CDN at the end of 2023 sits in front of every site by default and caches static files only.

Worth knowing

The serverless platform publishes a page of limits: a request timeout, a per-site concurrency cap, a temporary filesystem and a cap on sites per account, some of them raised on request. Spend limits pause every site and database in a team once the monthly figure is reached. Neither platform offers a New Zealand location.

Email support and a Discord are free; chat, phone, application-level help, one-click restore, container cloning and automatic image updates come with the paid support tiers, billed as a monthly fee plus a charge per container, so an unmanaged container is updated by hand. Billing is in US dollars by Visa or Mastercard only. The terms ask for thirty days’ notice, give no refund for an unused subscription, and add a ten percent penalty to a late payment.