This website is now hosted on Slicehost (along with section99.net). It’s a little early to know how it will turn out, but so far I’m loving having not only a shell, but root access.

Signing up was completely painless and the the VPS was provisioned within minutes with several different operating system options (though I’m aware that this can sometimes take weeks depending on current capacity). While I run the bleeding edge version of Ubuntu at work, I opted for the slightly safer option, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

Setting up Lighty / PHP and Mysql took mere minutes thanks to apt-get and Debian’s sane default configuration. WordPress took a tiny bit of fiddling in Mysql so I could test it on another domain name, but aside from that, everything has been very painless.

I’m hoping that this gives me the chance to play with some webpy and even (maybe) some rails applications.

The only problem I’ve had (except for screwing up the DNS) is editing my crontab when loged in as a normal user. I’m unable to edit it due to a weird permission error. While it’s not a huge problem (root can edit anybodies crontab easily) but it’s odd that the only real information I can find is related to an old Debian bug.