[vox] webhosting/shell recomendations?

[ME]

Rob Rogers said:
> I'm looking to switch hosting providers, and was hoping someone could
> give me some suggestions of companies they've used and liked. I'm not
> currently doing that much with my hosting... 90% of my bandwidth is used
> for email, but I have started playing around with the Drupal CMS, and
> will probably be using it a lot more soon. My main requirement though is
> something with a full working shell.
>
> My current host looked good, and had just about everything I need,
> except they are using a feature of cpanel called jailshell... As you
> might guess, it's a chroot jail, but it's got some serious bugs. If I
> log in more than once (including using scp while I'm logged in)
> everything starts to go screwy. I might start up mutt, and have no color
> support, or try and quit mutt, and get a "cannot open temporary file"
> error,  or try to run ps and get error messges about /proc not being
> mounted... Needless to say, this is quite frustrating.

There are a variety of different colocation services available with
various offers ranging from simple web-hosting through to true colocation.

I bought a Dell PowerEdge 1U unit and do my colocation business with
http://www.johncompanies.com/ . I know they do not have the most
competetive rates in the present state of the internet, but they have
great service. When I first saw their advertisement, I thought they were
either clueless or skilled. This came from a line on their ad:

(From their site)
"There are no boundaries on the questions you can ask. Need help chrooting
a name server ? Advice on which mail MTA to install ? Problems setting up
an ssh tunnel ? We are happy to help with these things and more, and we
will resolve your problem within 24 hours."

After asking around, I heard good things and chose to go with them. They
allow for 3 kinds of "colocation" service.
True colocation: Send them any 1U system for $105/month
Virtualized Linux Server: You get your own virtual system that you can
administer and are root. They take care of system backup and hardware.
$75/month
Virtualized BSD: (like Linux) $65/month.

I like the company because there are no hidden costs. It is a flat-fee. If
I want to send them memory or a HD to add to my system, their installation
of it on my system is part of the monthly cost. Need a cycle of power on
my unit? Included.

About 1.2 years ago, I did a survey of colocation services and put up my
findings. It is a bit out of date, but here is the URL:

http://mike.passwall.com/colocation.html

For more up-to-date data, try checking out these two as they will likely
be more current:
http://www.hostchart.com/
http://www.webhosters.com/

HTH,
-ME