[colug-432] shell account hosting?

[R P Herrold]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2012, Rick Hornsby wrote:

> Are there any reputable places to find such a thing?  I 
> don't mind paying for it, but the price can't be excessive.

http://www.pmman.com/

offers service that: is unfiltered; will be bog solid reliable 
in multiply redundant network fabric; has a fast self-erve 
deployment tools for several distributions [1]; includes a DNS 
'wizard' tool capable of A, CNAME, MX, PTR, AAAA, SRV, and TXT 
records; fast issue, low cost SSL certificates through 
StartSSL [in all the browsers, unlike, say, CACert or a 
self-signed one] by a 'class 2' issuer; has on demand 
self-serve backups, and self-serve re-starts from any such 
designated backup; has native ipv4 and ipv6; has a mature 
team-friendly development and debug interface to actually pass 
around ['hand-off'] a working copy of a machine image that 
provides a 'working reproducer' of software bugs; is local; 
and has techs on this mailing list

The colug mailing list operates in a VM there, and I'm 
considering moving the COLUG web presence up there too

As I have a financial interest, and know what is involved in 
providing the service at that level, I don't consider it 
excessive, but I am sure there are less expensive out there. 
[2] In building it out, we built it to satisfy high quality 
standards, and not to a price point.  The service has been 
used to build a distribution for Wind River (now part of 
Intel), one for the U S Navy on a mil-spec level embedded unit 
on some specialty hardware, and for a couple of other Linux 
distributions

We did not design or build this out for a low intensity hobby 
user, but rather to serve as a high grade production tool 
environment; I've used several other services (AWS, RackSpace, 
more) and shamelessly made sure we meet what I consider the 
best features of each, and taken a fresh look tte actual needs 
of an Agile, Devops environment, and support that use case

Perhaps overkill for an IRC client, although I run:
 	screen irssi
inside one

-- Russ herrold

[1] Centos 5, Centos 6, Fedora 15, Fedora 16, Serentos 6; arch
 	are both i686, and x86_64

[2] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ruskin
 	There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot
 	make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The
 	person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.