they do a few price levels, the more the setup fee, the less the monthly cost. 49 a month for over a terabyte of data is still rather nice 
[quote]…plus $20 a month for basics normally included free like Plesk (which I can happily do without, assuming you get full root shell access?).
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Didn’t bother getting that, the silver support (or what ever it’s called) is free and means they do the security updates for you. This comes as fun when they update certain things and iptables stops working. When it comes to the firewall being down I don’t leave it that way long, and as I don’t have the time to investigate it, the only thing to do is a reboot, but everything comes right back fine it seems. I did have to go through and delete some crap when we first got our box, like rpc was still enabled, but after that I have to say I am impressed with the service, I put in a support call to get them to change the schedule for updates (so it’s done when the UK is in bed, rather than when the yanks are) and it was all delt with quickly. They give you complete root access, you are the one with the root password. If you go for the silver support package you have to give them the root password too. My pseudo random sequence of lower case, upper case, numbers and symbols seems to be happily used by them, I have no idea what it is these days and don’t care, I set up sudoers so I never log in as root anyway.
[quote]But your point stands that it’s a shedload of b/w for almost nothing. I’m impressed
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me too
[quote]Re: your experiences with this server, what are the servers like? Any weird stuff installed that’s a pain to get rid of? (or do you just use the standard LAMP and so not care?)
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the servers seem shiney and responsive, the latency from the UK isn’t great, but then it’s a box in the US, so it’s to be expected. I’ve managed to download from it at 60 KB (ie, filled me ADSL pipe), and I managed to d/l to it from another site in the US at 200kB. It’s a standard deadrat install, so there is some crap to be removed, but it’s not hard to stop it comming up on bootup, or to shut it down. The disk space is 80gig on ours, so i’ve not bothered uninstalling it, I just up the shields on the firewall, and stop any service I don’t want to run, so in theory, even if the firewall is down, the only ports that can be got to, are the ones that can be got at anyway.
I certainly have no complaints yet, apart from the iptables one, but i’m not too unsurprised as I seem to get problems with iptables at random times on my own machines running gentoo. (install new kernel, iptables needs a rebuild etc).
HTH
Endolf
