Just a quick post today, having a quick review of Linode VPS now I have had chance to play with it.  For those of you who havn’t heard of Linode, they specialise in providing Virtual Private Servers (VPSs). Signing up for acount was easy I went for their base package of Linode 360, which gives you 360mb of ram, 12GB storage and 200GB transfers for $19.95.

Once payment is completed Linode let you reserve your VM.  Linode use 4 data centres, and once you paid you get to chose at which data centre you want you VPS hosted.  Only three of the 4 data centres had free slots so I chose a data centre on the east coast.  From then on you can get into the Linode Dashboard to manage your VPS.

Next up is creating your boot drive, Linode has a whole bunch of distros to choose from, including Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS, there is even Gentoo if you have the time to build it on a VPS.  I decided on Ubuntu 8.10 64bit edition and used up 8GB of my storage allowance to make the boot image, and used the remaining 4GB for my /home.  The Distro wizard automatically sets up everything needed to boot them image and starting the VPS is one click away.

Setting up the home drive was a little more complicated but, but all it took was adding the /home drive to the bootimage config and editing the fstab to mount the drive on boot and everything was set up.

Linode also provide a SSH based Console calls Lish, so even if you muck up your iptables or say uninstall your ssh server you can still access your VPS, as well as charts of your recent CPU/newtwork usage, and progrss bars so you keep track on how much bandwidth you have been using.

So for less than a week of use I would give linode a thumbs up!

From BBC News

Background

My parents have been with Pipex internet for 5 years, having excellent service, and never having to call support.  Then in July of 2007 Pipex was bought out by Tiscali.

The Issues Start

Everything went fine until without warning in February of 2008 Tiscali transferred them to their LLU product.  This is when the trouble started, Tiscali’s idea of transferral is unplug from the old service and forget to plug into the new service.  So a number of calls later, and almost a week of no internet later they work out that they have made a mistake and reconnect us.

So it gets to September and our current subscription with Pipex/Tiscali runs out, two weeks after they first can’t take the money they send us a letter demanding a years internet at £281.30.  Unhappy with the service my Dad calls up Pipex to cancel the contract at this point, and even though he is the card holder and phone line holder Tiscali will not talk to him because I opened the account.  Eventual they agree to call me and I authorise them to talk to my Dad.

After much argument and a number of phone calls Tiscali agreed to a new deal with us, £7.99 a month with three months free (basically their new customer deal).  So dad paid up for the year (£71.51) thinking that would be it.
(continue reading…)

Edit
So back on my PC now, and some other points I would add to the above. As the above proves the iPhone WordPress application also lacks any sort of spell checking beyond auto-suggestion. It does however let you write a draft post and upload it without publishing it, so if thing of something on the road you can still write about it and correct it once you back.
Set up of the application was relatively easy, other than miss typing my domain and user name on the silly touch keyboard. You do however have to do is ensure that remote RPC is enabled if you installed WordPress yourself, so it’s worth turning this on if you think your going to use the application in the future.
As I said above one of the menus failed to draw properly when I was testing the application, but when I restarted it corrected itself and didn’t really cause any usability issues.
Overall I think for the avid blogger the WordPress application is worth adding to your app collection, it is free after all, just don’t expect to be writing essays on it.

So I finaly got around do sorting out some hosting and this is going to (hopefully) be where I am going to ramble about things.  I expect there to be a heavy bias to technology but not really sure yet.

I am currently just playing around with things like themes and setting up my home page and knowing me I may end up just nuking everything before long, but if this blog survives I will let people know what I learn along the way, as it has been a long time since I have tried to set up Apache properly.