After a couple of months looking for a VPS that was relatively cheap, reliable and gave me all the access I needed. I settled on slicehost, I couldn't find the normal trail of horror stories that goes hand in hand with many cheap hosting solutions and after narrowing my choices down to a few, I decided that slicehost just had the edge, I am pleased with my decision so far. The most important thing for me was to have full root access, some kind of "get out of jail free card" if it all went horribly wrong and a selection of distro's so I can swap things around if I need to...after all, this is to be my self learning area for setting up several things I've wanted to do for a while and I wasn't exactly sure which was the best way forward...so...bull by the horns time and over to the slicehost site to make my purchase. This happened one week ago today and i'm pleased to say that all has gone well. I bought my "slice" last Friday evening and got to work, unfortunately I was also drinking beer so at about 3am I required to use my afore mentioned "get out of jail free card", re-built the slice and went to bed all the wiser! To be continued...

I have, in the past days secured my slice by adding an administrator user to my slice and disabling root access, installed apache and mysql(deleting annoymous accounts along the way), fine tuned both apache and mysql to optimise them a bit, set up virtual hosts in apache so i can now serve different domains correctly, installed and configured subversion for my own personal source control of projects(you see, andy allan, I DO listen!) and most recently, installed the django framework which I will write an update on once I'm finished experimenting with it. I must add at this point that the documentation provided by slicehost is absolutely superb, it will be a handy resource for anyone using any sort of linux hosting so i'll just point you in the direction of it here.

So, some of you will be asking..."where's the coldfusion?", well, this VPS is for my personal experimentation into other things...namely python/django so you may also be asking "where's the php?"...The answer is, I've chosen not to install either on this particular VPS, I have access to our company dedicated server running coldfusion 8 and do my coldfusion there, I also have access to our several PHP VPS's and to be honest...I dont particularly want to do PHP any more unless there is a client requirement for it....there's also a bit of test I'm running..."lets see how long I don't need to install PHP for!".

Like most web developers, I've long relied on Linux hosting to serve up the goodies and probably, like most web developers, I've been happy to pay for a managed service where I can email support and have them make changes to the server configuration when needs be...this is great...except I'm one of those curious types that needs to know not just that something works.....oh no, eventually I'm going to need to know both how and why it works as well, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before I chose this route of having an absolutely bare bones server install and a terminal. I've always thought that the best way to learn anything is to calmly walk from the changing room, past the shallow end, past the deep end, climb up to the highest board and throw yourself off....now swim!

I have been going one week with this now and absolutely love it, I now know more about server configurations than I ever did before and would be confident tapping away at a terminal for any server requirements we may have in the future.