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The article sounds like it was written by somebody who's never heard of "computer security" and is trying to wrap his head around basic concepts.

And also someone who is presumably not running any web-servers - otherwise they'd only need to check their own web logs. I've got hosting with Bytemark and DigitalOcean and both have had a hand full shellshock attempts amongst all the usual PHP/WordPress/MySQLAdmin/whatever attempts.

The only very moderately interesting thing I've noticed is that Shellshock attempts seem to only by IP address and not by host (I'm hosting multiple websites per VM), so presumably most shellshock-bots are just sweeping IP ranges rather than using a list of known hosts.

I employ Debian as an email/web server platform. What I've always missed is a command line tool I can use to set these services up without any graphical interface. A wizard to handle the hops would be awesome.

Now, before you label me a troll, let me mention that I loathe the GUI. And as a server described above, I surely don't need it.

Bytemark Symbiosis may be of interest to you.

Not been the case for years, you can download the "install50.iso" image from the mirrors right now.

http://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html

Example:

http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/pub/OpenBSD/5.0/i386/install50.iso

These UK ISPs have quite a lot of that list covered.

Although the UK's situation, as far as broadband goes, is not perfect, the incumbent telco (BT) is at least forced by the regulator (Ofcom) to act as a wholesaler. Any ISP can provide service over BT's phone lines and backbones.

If I had to use a reliable webhost, it would cost me, what, $50/mo?

There are plenty of reliable hosts that cost much less than that. Even here in the UK, where hosting is generally more expensive than in the US, I only pay £15/month (about $25) for a virtual machine with root access. If I was willing to live without root, I could get it for £10. I've had less than an hour of downtime over the last year. I don't know how reliable dreamhost is, but I'd say this system is certainly reliable enough for the application you describe.

We considered VMware, but they didn't have the admin expertise in-house, and I forget what the license cost was, but that was an issue, too.

The license cost of vmware server 2 is $0. Sure, the more advanced system (vmware infrastructure) can get expensive, but I doubt there'd be much point with such a small cluster.

I did some rough cost comparisons for a high-traffic web site in my similarly cynical article a few weeks ago (disclaimer: I run a hosting company flogging unfashionable servers, and am not a cloud fan yet :) ).

yes, I asked them to help. Bytemark are great!

Bytemark - UK based, decent service, VMs and Dedicated hosts... really well supported. Been using them for two years.

The main site is down for some reason (slashdot does that). The torrent is mirrored at: http://mirrors.atarack.com/Kororaa-Xgl-Live-CD-0.1 .torrent We have ISO mirrors here for the impatient: (thanks to softpedia)
here (thanks to rdt1.org)
here (thanks to Mudrii)
here (thanks to Hotel Peter)
here (thanks to Over Confident)
here (thanks to sefcom)
here (thanks to Digital Extortion), and
here (thanks to Chris Peters from Canada)
here (Atarack VDS/VPSes who are our proud sponsors)
(To buy an atarack VPS e-mail us at sdhillon@atarack.com or at ndevito@atarack.com)

• FreeOnRails Offers free RubyOnRails hosting with FastCGI support using cPanel/Fantastico - 100 MB space/1 GB Bandwidth. (By India based developer)

• Hardfocus Media Full-service hosting in Japan. cPanel, Ruby on Rails, FastCGI, PHP, MySQL, etc. (Support in English)

• RailsHost.cn We support Ruby on Rails, FastCGI, PHP, MySQL, SSH-access and so on. (Chinese speaking)

Australia

• Hostcentral Australian based hosting provider with full Ruby-on-Rails support. MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, Python and Perl support also provided. Melbourne based servers with 99.5% SLA.

• SegPub Segment Publishing is a Sydney, Australia-based company who specialise in standards-compliant web development and FreeBSD-powered web hosting. Supports PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails (via Lighttpd), Subversion and more.

• WebSpace.net.au Australian web hosting company providing ruby on rails support, as well as support for all the other well known web-development languages (PHP, Perl, Python, .NET). All of our staff are technically minded (either systems administrators or programers), and are committed to bringing you the best support and web-hosting experience possible, bar none!

Europe

• Blackcurrant Hosting Blackcurrant Hosting offers Free Ruby on Rails hosting (FastCGI) with Unlimited MySQL databases. PHP4 & PHP5 also provided, as well as SSH access. cPanel-based hosting. Free--£0/year! We also offer paid plans from £25/Year.

• GsFactory.Net Ofertamos RoR con todos nuestros planes Linux, desde 3.5$/Mes. Ademas de PostgreSQL y JSP/Servlets con Tomcat. Now we offer RoR with our Linux Packages. Starting from 3.5$/Month.

• gradwell dot com Gradwell dot com Ltd (www.gradwell.com) offers ruby on rails hosting, with mysql, ssh access and others like php, mysql etc. Hosted on our own big unix server cluster in London. Customer support provided by a small team of 10 in Bath, South West UK.

• ProInet.se Now offering Ruby On Rails with our standard packages, we are one of the first Swedish hosting companies so offering this. Starting from 10:-SEK/Month for the cheapest package.

• nobudget hoster Now offering Free Typo Hosting! Cheap Plans with full suport. We install evrything you need to runn your Application! We currently provide Ruby on Rails, Symfony and Django, a lot more coming soon!

• Bytemark Hosting provide Linux Virtual Machines from ?15p.m. (this package has 80MB RAM, 4GB disc space and 25GB transfer). This is plenty for supporting a Rails application, MySQL database and lighttpd, and we're happy to use and support Rails ourselves. Plus you get root access; no sharing necessary.

• Happy Gecko - English speaking ISP in Spain 500mb web space, 150 euros per year including PHP, ASP, Ruby on Rails and MySQL support. SSH access also included.

• Hospes.pl : hosting Probably first in Poland hosting service based mainly on PostgreSQL. Offers both fundamental and advanced services for corporate and regular customers. Supports Ruby on Rails, PHP, Perl, CGI, Python

Bytemark - UK based, £15 a month - you get your own User Mode Linux machine, choice of distro, root access, and it's fast and reliable.

Have a look at my uptime - http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /cnuk.org

Either online, or in RL. Talk to people, ask them which hosting company they use, if they are happy with it and why. Read the blogs of people of people you know, trust or who are into similar things as you. Jump on usenet, go to teh forums at places like webhostingtalk or at the actual hosting service itself and read what people are saying.

Ignore articles published by news sites, magazines and the like. They are out to make money and hence are biased. You cannot get a feel for how good a hosting service is, or how reliable it is, or how good their support is by playing with the hosting service's web interface for 5 minutes or by comparing feature lists, which is exactly what the journalist that wrote the article did.

I was looking for a hosting service a few weeks ago and I immediately thought of two: bytemark.co.uk and Linode. Why? Because a know a few people who use bytemark.co.uk and are happy with it and I have aread a lot about about Linode being good on places like Planet Gnome. So I compared the cost features of the two and chose the one that looked the best.

The information is out there, you just need to use it.

First port of call: http://www.bytemark.co.uk./ Great service, groovy boxes. I've never had any complaints.

...also Bytemark and Memset in the UK.