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The inbred upper class Damasos running the VC cabal have a strong social interest in reducing or eliminating upward mobility of the middle classes.

http://sasamat.xen.prgmr.com/m...

Linode is very good. Yes, they had an issue once, and dealt with it professionally.

If you want even less expensive options, other good ones start at like $5/mo. This must be in shared hosting price range, right?

This is one well known one. I don't use it, but I've heard good things. http://prgmr.com/

So in other words, IPv6 from the backbone to a home PC's 802.11g radio will be deployed around the time the last mainstream non-SNI PC operating system is scheduled to die anyway [microsoft.com].

Pretty much.

So how would you explain to the users that a blog, forum, or wiki is supposed to raise a serious certificate error after the user is logged in, and that HTTPS with such a serious error is safer for the user than an HTTP connection that can be Firesheeped?

Ask the gentoo guys behind bugs.gentoo.org, who use a CA whose cert isn't generally shipped, or anyone who's using a self-signed cert. I'm not here to get into an argument of over the weights, values and concerns of various degrees of encryption and authentication. For some, it's enough that passive sniffing isn't feasible. For some, that isn't enough, and you need to authenticate the server identity.

Don't ask me to make grand sweeping statements of 'X is enough security', because security is a case-by-case thing. Heck, I note that even Slashdot isn't defaulting to SSL.

The difference between $5 per month name-based shared hosting, which may put a thousand or more domains on one IPv4 address, and a VPS. You mention a $5 to $7 per month VPS plan; which provider do you recommend?

I use prgmr.com. I wouldn't put a full LAMP server on a $7/mo plan; the low-end plans wouldn't really be up to it. But, again, I could easily imagine paying that just so you can drop a squid proxy server on it listening on port 80. Have your domain point to that. Have squid serve as an accelerator proxy, pointing to your shared hosting provider. Squid can wrap your clients' connections with your SSL cert so they can't be firesheep'd on their local wireless or by their local malicious network. Granted, the connection between squid and your shared hosting provider is unencrypted, but the people on that route are far less likely to care. (so long as your VPS and shared hosting provider are in the same country).

Personal use SSL certificates have been free of charge from StartCom for some time now.

StartCom's free certs are only good for a year. You're far better spending off a dollar or two more per month than spending time every year coping with cert rollover headaches. If you can't afford that (after spending $7-10/yr for a domain), I have to wonder why you aren't using a wiki, forum or blog farm that handles these things centrally, and for free.

Is there a standard WordPress app, a standard phpBB 3 app, or a standard MediaWiki app?

There's a Wordpress app. I don't know if a MediaWiki app has cropped up, but I'd been considering writing one as an interface to my own site. I don't know if anyone's written a phpBB 3 app, but I can imagine some real benefits to it. (Imagine having your phone use the normal notification channel to inform you of PMs or replies.)

The market is in a crunch right now, with security concerns and IPv4 address depletion. It's not a pretty situation, and something has to give. Before anything else, that's going to be the IE-on-WinXP market. (IPv6 doesn't even solve the IE-on-WinXP issue, since you need to explicitly enable experimental IPv6 support to get it on WinXP)

According to Google Analytics, my site had 126,947 visits over the last month, and only 5,480 of those were from IE-on-WinXP. That's 4.3% of my traffic. I'd stop giving one whit once that's down to about IE-on-XP once it's down to about 5%, so IE-on-XP is no longer something I need to care about. Heck, I had 22,387 visits from WinXP during the same period, which tells me only one in four WinXP users are still using IE when they visit my site.

IE-on-XP is not a demographic most people need to be reaching for. And, really, if you need TLS, and you need a non-SNI circumstance, and you can't afford another $5/mo (hec

Prgmr.com owner Luke Crawford has some diary entries at k5 where he talks about his business...

I've been happy customer of his for the past 2 years, so this comment is a vote for Luke.

Is he LSC or CT? I've got the book, and interact with LSC on IRC regularly; he's one of the principals behind prgmr.com, of which I'm a customer. (And I've got the book...)

I used to do the same thing, but I ended up getting an account from prgmr.com. My own private 6GB CentOS virtual server for $8 a month, and a multi-homed 100MBps connection with 40GB bandwidth.

Can't beat that.

I don't think there's a single-host solution. For reliability: go with http://pair.net/. For control: get a virtual server. I use http://prgmr.com/ and am extremely satisfied - they're cheap, responsive, and the technical support is excellent. They're also nice, honest people. See http://lowendbox.com/ for more options. For storage, backups, and data transfer: go with someplace like http://dreamhost.com/. If you need more than one of the above, go with more than one host. For example, start with Prgmr.com (or Pair) and your site there, and when you need more disk space or bandwidth get a Dreamhost account. Then store your images and site backups at Dh while keeping your code and frontend at Prgmr.

I have a VPS at Gandi.net and it's a thousand times better than being hosted by a company that controls your web site. Gandi is the best according to me (for just one reason: I can prepay and they do not store my credit card number) but I've also heard good things about Slicehost, prgmr, and Linode.

1. If you're looking for a shared web host solution (maybe under 50-100k unique hits a month), you can't go wrong with http://www.asmallorange.com/ . I used their "small" shared hosting package for several years and never had a problem.

2. If you're looking for a VPS with quite a bit more available resources than a web host solution and you like to setup your own *nix box, you'd be good with http://www.linode.com/ http://www.slicehost.com/ (those two primarily support Linux, but you can setup a NetBSD Xen slice by hand if you are so inclined), or if you really don't want any brakes when it comes to setting up your Xen VPS, http://www.prgmr.com/ (they also primarily support Linux, but they have a HOWTO on their wiki on how to setup NetBSD.)

3. I haven't found a good unmanaged dedicated host yet, though I hear http://www.softlayer.com/ is great. If you want a managed dedicated host, you can't go wrong with http://www.rackspace.com/ .

Luke Crawford is great - I used to have a virtual server hosted with his company, prgmr.com. You can feel pretty confident in your xen machine when the guy who maintains it literally wrote the book on it.

outages from the uptime calculation? I thought only really shady companies; the type that put up the 'site is down for maintenance' page when something breaks, excluded planned downtime from the sla. I don't exclude planned downtime from my SLA http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/SLA - in fact, the last time I paid out a SLA the downtime was planned; I was moving some servers from one rack to another.

I just can't imagine the phone company saying "oh, yeah. the phone outage was planned, so we still have 100% uptime"

people your own age with around 20 years experience. Obviously, those people will be more desirable than you will. (education is usually comparable to experience, year for year.)

I haven't seen much obvious ageism, but then I'm 28, (been doing this since 15... I'll have 20 years by the time I'm 35) I've worked with a whole lot of really awesome old folks. one guy had 40 years of experience, and it showed. he was really good. You will, however, have a hard time getting a toehold right now, just 'cause the economy is shit and you have no XP. You need to go grind XP. I would advise starting right now. relevant work experience and college beats college hands down.

my advice to you is to make sure that every job from now on is IT related, even if you have to take one that pays crap. There are always companies around (see mine, though I'm not hiring at the moment) that will hire you as a jr sysadmin if you are willing to work for slightly above retail wages. I know I put in my time at that rate. HE.net around here hires rack monkeys for $15/hr. that's around what I end up usually paying for people as well.

If you really can't get a related job (and that's possible, the economy really is shit right now. everyone I know who is even a little marginal is having a hard time of it.) start your own company. I'm serious. even if you have no money, go buy a $5 VPS (hey, how about you buy it from me? http://prgmr.com/xen/ - but seriously, I have lots of competition. servers are cheap now.) write a webapp, let people use it for free. write a blog about things you are figuring out while you write the webapp. You can then put that on your resume as industry experience. Maybe it will get big? who knows.

But yeah, until the economy lets up, you are going to have a hard time of it. good luck.

abandoned after ec2 came out. EC2 does most of what it sounds like you want... except for the redundancy in providers. Personally, I'm working on building a better provisioning system for my own VPS services at http://prgmr.com/xen but the idea is that it's not that hard, even with the way ec2 is now, to take your ec2 image and run it on another xen host, or take a xen image and run it on ec2. (now getting a 'public' image off amazon ec2 and downloading it, that's hard. but if it's your image, downloading it is trivial. and amazon has all the tools you need to turn it into a plain file or tarball that any Xen provider can use)

First problem is that you need a fully automated billing/provisioning system before going live. I like http://freeside.biz/ - but like everything else, it will require some customization. It doesn't matter what you use. But use something. This was my second (and perhaps my largest) mistake.

after you have the billing system setup, get it integrated with provisioning on servers you have at home (you don't want to start paying for hosting until you are ready to put customers online. In fact, I would argue that it's better to buy more hardware than you need than to buy more hosting than you need. If you blow a lot of money on hardware and then fail it, you can at least sell it for a fraction of what you paid. If you blow a lot of money on hosting and then fail it, like I did, you are out of luck - Note, you can get awesome bandwidth deals if you buy a lot at once and sign a long contract. Don't. pay the higher prices for the ability to keep your pre-pay closer to what you need.)

After this you need to decide if you want to buy or rent servers. I like buying, because I like having lots of ram, and most places who rent charge you through the nose for ram. (which is odd, as I can go to newegg and get 4Gb of unbuffered ECC for around $100) As far as I can tell, most deadicated servers are priced such that if you keep them for more than 3-6 months, you are better off buying servers and co-locating them.

First problem is that you need a fully automated billing/provisioning system before going live. I like http://freeside.biz/ - but like everything else, it will require some customization. It doesn't matter what you use. But use something. This was my second (and perhaps my largest) mistake.

after you have the billing system setup, get it integrated with provisioning on servers you have at home (you don't want to start paying for hosting until you are ready to put customers online. In fact, I would argue that it's better to buy more hardware than you need than to buy more hosting than you need. If you blow a lot of money on hardware and then fail it, you can at least sell it for a fraction of what you paid. If you blow a lot of money on hosting and then fail it, like I did, you are out of luck - Note, you can get awesome bandwidth deals if you buy a lot at once and sign a long contract. Don't. pay the higher prices for the ability to keep your pre-pay closer to what you need.)

After this you need to decide if you want to buy or rent servers. I like buying, because I like having lots of ram, and most places who rent charge you through the nose for ram. (which is odd, as I can go to newegg and get 4Gb of unbuffered ECC for around $100) As far as I can tell, most deadicated servers are priced such that if you keep them for more than 3-6 months, you are better off buying servers and co-locating them.

I do think that another host using an automated provisioning system that is compatable with EC2 would be a good thing- If I wasn't absolutely swamped by my dayjob, I'd try to implement such a thing.

I don't know which is better, but you can get now $5/month http://prgmr.com/ VPS( Virutal Private Server?) with Xen which is awesome!

Now, you really only need the Brocade if you have multiple computers, but it really does make things much easier than using the traditional SCSI reserve and release commands with a shared bus.

Of course, the kids today seem to like IDE. Me, I don't use it for anything other than near-line backups. For that sort of thing, I use one of the 14 bay SuperMicro cases. they are pretty nice.