I'm also very happy with SliceHost. But you have to understand the limitations of their offering. They're offering you a blank canvas -- an empty box with a standard Linux distribution installed. It does not have any user-friendly administration tools installed, beyond what comes with the distribution. Instead, they assume that their customers know how to manage servers themselves. If you want more of a GUI, you can install any control panel you want, but you have to install it yourself.

As such, the SliceHost control panel is very minimal. It will display some instantaneous statistics about CPU time, memory usage and network traffic. It also lets you reboot your server and restore from backups or from a standard distribution template. That's about all that it does.

That said, the control panel is very nicely done -- just minimal.

This isn't for everyone, but my personal feeling is that if you're in the market for a VPS, you should be familiar with how to configure it yourself. If you're not already comfortable with Linux system administration and the Unix command line, then I think you're better off with fully managed hosting. I wouldn't want to try and keep a VPS alive and secure without being a proficient Linux sysadmin.